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I'm fairly new to REBOL, and very excited about it. I don't work for them. I just like their stuff. << Can REBOL do audio? Does it support MP3 native? How about more obsure audio formats? If not, is it fast enough to decode it if you wrote the decoder in REBOL itself? >> Only WAV support so far. I haven't seen anyone write a decoder yet, but that doesn't mean it can't be done. Just translate all those huffman tables... << What about movies? Can it play sorenson quicktimes? Does it have support for AVI? Once again, you should be able to add in movie support or codec support by writing it in REBOL itself assuming it truely is a complete platform like they say it is. >> You could probably write *anything* in REBOL, though performance might not be acceptable in all cases. The REBOL folks face the challenge of keeping the size down, while cramming in all the features people want. Something's gotta give and I think video support is that something. They may add it, and some of the issues are political (if you can called patented formats and such a political issue). << . What I always come out feeling is that Rebol is powerful because its libraries are powerful. >> Yes and no. It does have powerful libraries but its reflective and dynamic capabilities are, IMO, much more important. << For example, Rebol claims to make writing an email client easy. But that is just because it has email address as a datatype and SMTP built-in. You can do the same with the appropriate libraries in any language. >> That's true, but in those other languages, can you just type an email address, with no extra syntax, and have it recognized as such? That's a big difference IMO. << Another example is the parsing stuff: while it provides the possible to parse input, I've never seen an example where the syntax was really augmented vs. the basic Rebol syntax. They always end-up with some keywords, some modifiers introduced by a slash and block ([]). Would it be really possible to create an entirely different syntax as a dialect? Could I write for example a PostScript dialect that would read pure PostScript, except for an enclosing context? >> REBOLs dialecting capabilities are very cool. The dialects we're seeing so far (e.g. layout and parse) have been designed for use by REBOL programmers, so it makes sense that they were designed to be syntactially similar. The thing that excites me most is the ability to *easily* create little languages (dialects) that let people type in human terms and yet can be processed programmatically. << this thread sounds like 5 of the 10 guys working on REBOL started astroturfing the message boards. Perhaps I will check it out, but the level of ass-kissery on this board has definitely raised my level of skepticism. >> REBOL has a small but vocal following. Can you blame us for being excited about what we think is a *great* tool? I haven't seen posts from anybody who works at REBOL. It's just us rabid fans. << Also, I would argue that one of the noted drawbacks from above -- REBOL is not open source -- is a pretty key point, and not just a minor drawback. If some technology is going to be the lynchpin of the next generation Internet, do you really want one company controlling it? >> I hear this one a lot, as if open source is the be-all, end-all way to develop software. In some cases it might be. In others it absolutely won't. You can fault their business plan, and their product, but the two are really exclusive of one another (bound together by association, but not the same). << I would like to see a usefull example app... this is sincere request. >> OK. What would you consider to be a useful example app? << I understand that rebol is a easy to use and develop language but, as it stands, it just a language. How does it enable usage of web services any better than other languages? >> Web services are an unknown commodity at this point, though they are taken as existing technology because of powerful marketing. To me, this makes them the object of many comparisons which may not be appropriate. Can you write web services with REBOL? Yes. Maarten Koopmans has written a nifty piece of middleware (best term I can manage at the moment) called Rugby which lets you do this kind of thing HOWEVER, we shouldn't confuse web services with REBOLs core concept of being a "messaging" language. That's its strength, its trump card, its ace-in-the-hole and it is almost completely unexploited in that regard so far. We compare REBOL to other languages because we need a common Universe of Discourse. Unfortunately, it's really an apples-to-oranges comparison at best IMO. << What about support of other languges than english? E.g. in Rebol/View yext boxes I cannot enter any of non english language characters. It also cannot correctly display text in my locale. >> Now, this is a valid point! I think RT is working on international character support, and I *hope* they are, but it isn't there yet AFAIK. --Gregg