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Comment by soapdog | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone has a link comparing Red to REBOL? I was a heavy REBOL user back then and always missed the language. I wonder if Red is a viable substitute...

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From my reading today it seems REBOL 3 and Red have semi-merged [1]. REBOL 3 extensions can be written in Red, and the communities seem to share the same online spaces and goals.

Red looks awesome in the long run, the main weirdness being its refusal to follow standard math operator precedence [2].

Although Red's macro/DSL buildup skips a ton of intermediate bloat, someone needs to write a normal server framework to interact with standard industry data sources. When it becomes easy to add a Red microservice to an architecture, Red can enjoy an explosion of adoption as Go has.

[1] http://rebolforum.com/index.cgi?f=printtopic&topicnumber=27&...

[2] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/26514041/fixing-the-rebol...

As the person that replied to your second point on the SO question there, I have to add something here. There are other calculators made in Rebol. (Search rebol.org site scripts for those). Having this calculator adapted for the math operator precedence would be too farfetched, for the example merely shows how much can be done with so little code. The other is that I do not have the ultimate say in what Rebol and or Red should do with math operator precedence, I have nothing to say about that to be exact ;-) (I am free to express my opinion on the subject). What I state there still holds for me, the operator precendence is imho arbitrary, and not necessary at all, counterintuitive for kids, and (I am a mathematician) the world can do without these rules. With operator precendence I have no other choice then to use ellipses when I have 3 * 4 + 1 and I meant I wanted to add 1 to 4 before multiplying by 3: 3 * (4 + 1) in Rebol I can write 1 + 4 * 3 and I do NOT have to use "(" and ")" to achieve what I intended saving me four keystrokes.

Regards,

Arnold

Just saw this. That is not my SO question -- I'm just a lifetime programmer who has never seen rewriting of operator precedence in the tens of languages I've used.

Does the operator precedence convention of treating addition and multiplication equally apply to all of Red? All of REBOL? Or is it just that program? Thanks.

Both Rebol and Red use that convention. It sounds weird at first look, but proved to be a relief in practice (no need to remember any specific precedence rule). Though, we plan to provide a small math-oriented DSL for writing expressions using standard math conventions. It would look like this:

  >> print 1 + 2 * 3
  == 9
  >> print math [1 + 2 * 3]
  == 7

Um, the first link seems to me to only suggest unification of REBOL 3 and Red tests, not languages themselves; or do I miss something? Also, it seems to only suggest that, not claim it done yet?

Thanks a lot for the links and reply :)

You will find in Red everything you liked in Rebol, with some important additions like cross-platform static compilation and system programming abilities [1] through the built-in Red/System DSL. On the downside, Red is still alpha, but beta is just a few months ahead.

[1] http://static.red-lang.org/red-system-specs-light.html

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