ryelang

Languages I have been repeating this thought, that programming languages are user interfaces for a while, mostly to myself. To put it better, all programming languages are somewhere on the "user interface spectrum". As you go from the lower to the higher levelness of programming languages their core " audience " and their core vocabulary changes.  Lowest level languages speak to the machine, in the machine language, use machine constructs and machine vocabulary ... think Assembly or C.  Somewhat higher level languages forget about the machine a little and speak the language, use constructs and vocabulary of their abstract computational ideas/models. Think Lisp, Java, even Python. Their model can be based on some academic concept or it can be a more human friendly representation of lower level vocabulary and constructs. Even higher on the spectrum are for example command shells. It's audience is an  admin, a person, a user. It's vocabulary is centered around...

Regular expressions are a standard feature in most languages these days, but they are somewhat of a no-no in Rebol land. Rebol has this superior, very user friendly parse function and they see Regexp-s as some archaic cryptic syntax that is also much more limited than parse expressions are. And Rebol people are correct, regexps are worse and less powerful - but they can still be very useful and just the right medicine at times. Many times you just need that little cryptic but very terse and still quite standard, once you get the hang of it, regular expression to match, extract or replace some simple part of the text and you just don't want to deal with cleaner and more verbose solutions. Below is a simple demo that for better or worse explores all the valid forms of Rye "sentences" you can make. Using the two Regexp related functions for the canvas.   I haven't posted in a while but I am working on Rye on multiple fronts, just haven't completed it yet. I am wor...