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REBOL

Language type:

F - Functional or lambda-based

Description:

REBOL is a functional scripting language with message-passing and object-oriented features. It is designed for general application and network service development.
Intended to support both simple scripts and larger projects, REBOL has a fairly large complement of primitive data types: numbers, time, date, money, strings, booleans, words (atoms), and more. It also supports tuples and other primitive data aggregations, as well as application-oriented types like files, URLs, and email addresses. The primary grouping construct in REBOL is the block, it is used for both data and code aggregation (the way lists are used in Lisp and Scheme).
The evaluation and code structure concepts of REBOL resemble those of most other functional languages. As a first-class functional language, REBOL stores everything as data with a definite type; functions and objects are merely data constructed according to convention understood by the interpreter.
The REBOL core language has quite a few advanced features, consult the web sites listed below for details. Some of the supported features are: automatic memory management (gc), reflection, higher-order functions, exception handling, and dialecting.
There is only one existing implementation of REBOL, it is an interpreter that runs on a wide variety of operating systems. The system can be downloaded free, or purchased.

Origin:

C. Sassenrath, 1997.

See Also:

Perl    Java    Self    Python    Scheme   

Remarks:

REBOL stands for Relative Expression-based Object Language. The design of the language is purportedly based on five principles: simplicity, productivity, communications, independence, and humanity.
Future versions of REBOL are planned, and may support multi-threading, a GUI toolkit, Unicode/I18N support, and multimedia.

Links:

Overview: REBOL in 10 Steps

Download page

REBOL article at TechWeb

Date:

Last updated 10/17/98

Sample code:

REBOL [
	Title:   "99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall in REBOL"
	Author:  Neal Ziring
	Email:   ziring@home.com
	Date:    17-Oct-1998
	File:    %99beer.r
	Version: #REBOL-1-0-1
	Purpose: "Print the famous iterative beer song"
	Comment: {
		This is an example of a program in REBOL that
		prints the famous 99 bottles of beer on the
		wall song.  For more information on REBOL
		go to the web site www.rebol.com.
		This program is deliberately over-complicated
		to hot-dog some fancy features of REBOL.
	}
]



song: [
	Verse [ [if num > 0 [num] else ["No more"] ]  " "
		[if num == 1 ["bottle"] else ["bottles"] ]
	        " of beer on the wall," 
		1
		[if num > 0 [num] else ["No more"] ] " "
		[if num == 1 ["bottle"] else ["bottles"] ]
		" of beer!" 
		1
		"Take one down, pass it around!" 
		1
		[if num - 1 > 0 [num - 1] else ["No more"] ] " "
		[if num - 1 == 1 ["bottle"] else ["bottles"] ]
		" of beer on the wall."
		2
	]
	Finale [ "Time to buy more beer!" 1 ]
]

processItem: func [item num] [
	   if integer? item [loop item [prin newline] ]
	   if string? item  [prin item]
	   if block? item   [ftmp: func [num] item prin ftmp num ]
	   exit
]

dosong: func [start] [
	bottlesleft: start
        until [
		foreach item song/Verse [processItem item bottlesleft]
		bottlesleft: bottlesleft - 1
		(bottlesleft == 0)
	]
	foreach item song/Finale [processItem item 0]
	return none
]

dosong 99

Descriptions in this dictionary are ©1997-99 Neal Ziring. Some examples copyright of their respective authors. Some technologies and languages are trademarked. Permission to copy descriptions is granted as long as authorship credit is preserved.

Comments on this dictionary, corrections and suggestions, are all welcome. Please use email, the address is ziring@home.com