The week ending 21st January 2007

DevCon 2007

You can now register for this year's DevCon. Follow the instructions on the DevCon 2007 web site. Information on places to stay will be forthcoming shortly.

This year's conference will be held in Paris, France on May 10-11.

In the Wild

Brian Tiffin produces an rich, interactive Periodic Table of Elements. Great application of View features here.

Tim Johnson revises Andrew Martin's 'map function, used to apply a function to all values in a block.

Maarten Koopmans, inspired by the consolidation of his Rugby sources, embarks on building mod_rebol. Collaboration continues on the ‘REBOL3’ AltME world.

Mailing List

Sunanda introduces a Coding Challenge, engaging Rebollers in pursuit of the perfect compression algorithm. Plenty of submissions, but there's still time to displace the current leaders.

REBOL 3

RT present the composition of R3: “REBOL 3.0 Component Architecture”

“This document describes the REBOL 3.0 component architecture from the top design level.”

REBOL and the [Windows] Shell

And finally, a tip from Ramesh Gopal:

“Just a tip to share with everyone who has wanted to get Core to play nicely with the Windows command console.

Core 2.6.2 on Windows (I'm running Windows XP SP2) does seem to work in console mode (the Windows console, not REBOL's). It just takes a little bit of work to set up:

1. Get Jeremy Collake's freeware SETSUBSYS utility from here (unfortunately, the original author's site at CollakeSoftware.com is not working at the time of writing):

http://www.rapideuphoria.com/setsubsys.zip

(What an irony, having to go to another language site to get the file!)

2. Make a copy of your REBOL.EXE Core and place it somewhere on your path. Let's call it RC.EXE

3. Unzip SETSUBSYS.ZIP and run this command:

SETSUBSYS /C RC.EXE

(this changes a flag in the Core executable that tells Windows that this is a console-mode application, not a GUI application.)

4. Lo and behold, REBOL now outputs to the Windows command processor console without opening the REBOL console:

RC -cqsw --do "print {Hello World!}"

(At the minimum you MUST use the -w command line switch to suppress Core's normal behaviour of opening the REBOL console, otherwise you'll get no output on the Windows command processor console. I also recommend using the -q command line switch to suppress Core's startup noise. Another thing is that you must explicitly print or write to stdout to get any output; relying on the expression evaluation output like that found in the REBOL console does not work. BTW, you can still bring up the standard REBOL console: just omit the -w option.)

5. This, too, seems to work:

C:\>echo this is a test | RC -cqsw --do "print copy system/ports/input"
this is a test

6. And it also seems that running scripts that print also work:

; file: HELLO.R
REBOL []
print "Hello World!"

C:\>RC -cqsw hello.r
Hello World!

You may also find it handy to create a batch file that wraps your ‘console-mode’ REBOL so that invocation from the command line is much easier.

The usual disclaimers apply and YMMV.