Guest post by As the Syllable project predicted many years ago, version 3 of the REBOL programming language has finally been open sourced, under the Apache 2 licence (screenshot on Syllable Desktop). Also, the alpha version of the high-level Red programming language, supporting Syllable Desktop, has been released, by now in version 0.3.1 (screenshot, demo program, video at the Science Park in Amsterdam).
The Syllable project has contributed a website running on Syllable Server where you can try REBOL without installing it. REBOL originally constituted Syllable’s main cross-platform strategy, but the project is now also free to use it in the Syllable base platform, which should not contain closed parts. So far, REBOL3 ran on Syllable Desktop using the Linux version of the interpreter library. Now its source code compiles natively on Syllable, and the project has integrated it in Syllable’s build system. To compile REBOL and start it, enter the following commands in the terminal. You need the latest version of Builder. On Syllable Desktop0.6.7, do:
build update build log package unregister Builder package register Builder build REBOL-Core--current build install REBOL-Core--current r3
On Syllable Server, install the newer Builder package. Then do:
s build update build log build get REBOL-Core--current
Install the binary version of REBOL3 in the REBOL-Core--current/make/ subdirectory as r3-make. Then from the parent directory again:
build REBOL-Core--current build install REBOL-Core--current r3
Syllable now has the choice between the interpreted REBOL language and the compiled Red language. The Syllable project has already contributed a bridge between them, that allows to write REBOL extensions in the Red/System language. Previously, REBOL3 extensions needed to be developed inC, which has proven unpopular. This currently requires a development branch of Red on Windows, but this will be extended to Syllable.
The high-level Red programming language compiles to the low-level Red/System language as an intermediate format before compiling it to native machine code. Red/System was already ported to Syllable, but more work was needed for Red. It requires Syllable0.6.7 for its POSIX mmap support. Ready to run test programs are here (download, instructions) for all Red’s targets: Syllable, Linux x86, Linux ARM (screenshot on the Raspberry Pi, video on Hardware Freedom Day), Android, OS X and Windows.
The first Red screenshot shows Unicode support in the hello demo. Greek characters are shown correctly, but the Chinese characters are missing because they are not available in the DejaVu font that Syllable uses.
On Syllable Server, the Linux x86 versions of the test programs should be used, in the “Linux” subdirectory of the testing repository. Red aims to have minimal dependencies on its host systems. For the simpler programs, this means that one binary is compatible across most of the many varieties of Linux distributions – an advantage over many other programming languages. Some of the test programs that use bindings to complex libraries don’t fare so well, because the libraries change rapidly over different versions in different Linux distributions. This goes even for the source code compatibility of the test programs: compiling them again on your Linux system doesn’t help. Red does table-based configuration of the source code instead of test-based configuration, so the compilation result is independent from the build system. This helps to make cross-compilation trivial. The test programs for all systems were cross-compiled on Linux with the included build.r REBOL script.
On Windows, most of the test programs in the “MSDOS” subdirectory for the command prompt work better than the GUI versions in the “Windows” subdirectory, because they use command prompt output. The “MSDOS” subdirectory includes binaries for most of the libraries used by the test programs, so they don’t have to be installed separately.
Most of the OS X and Android versions of the test programs are untested, and several won’t run because the exact names of the needed libraries are incorrect. The project is interested in testers who can supply the correct library names and paths.
Originally, the plan for the Red compiler was to generate machine code immediately, while Red/System would only be used to write the low-level Red runtime library. This would have required multiple backends for each target system for both the Red and Red/System compilers. To save work, the Red compiler now has one backend generating Red/System code. Due to this decision, more effort has been spent to develop Red/System into a more capable language. While Red is in its alpha phase, Red/System is now quite mature. For example, it now supports namespaces, called contexts.
Also, the original plan for Red was to be a statically typed language with type inference, so it would have been fairly far removed from its inspiration, the dynamic, interpreted REBOL language. During implementation, it turned out that type inference could have disproportional costs, for example in terms of compilation time. Red will eventually include a JIT compiler, which should be fast, so it was decided to implement a hybrid static/dynamic typing system with optional typing. This brings Red quite close to the dynamic typing of REBOL, even though REBOL is an interpreter while Red is a compiler with a future JIT compiler. Currently, no optimisations are done, but future versions of Red will have ample room to implement optimisations through user-specified typing amended with automatic analyses.
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Anything particular you want explained?
Yes great, it was predicted by kaj about 6 years ago that it would be open sourced. At the beginning i was sceptical. Some years later seeing after a big stagnation of rebol I was sure too, that it’s the only thing that they still can do. Rebol 3 is now about since half of a decade in alpha phase.
So Rebol 3.0 ALPHA is now open source. But why dont they make Rebol 2.x opern source? Because Rebol 2 is in a useable state.
This “news” is like telling us that now (the horse) black beauty (now being very old and sick and soon dieing) will be very cheap to buy.
This news about rebol is lika a deja vu, nearly everytime (in the last years) when there is on osnews about syllable, then it has very little with syllable to do, but it’s about rebol. What is syllable going to do in future? Anytime when rebol gets a little update to write a news about it? Just because they dont make anything by themself, and for the sake of being in the “os-news”, we need to get this news from syllable?
Rebol and syllable have at least one thing in common:
both projects are at the limit of surviving, and they both hope that developers will come and start coding instead of them…..
It was not noticed in the last few years, that this doesnt work like that? Nobody came to rescue you. If you want success… than you must really work yourself, and go a good job, and not just waiting in hopeing that makin fake publicity will bring some stupid and at the same time capable(!) programmers to syllable, who will save them.
I shouldn’t have wasted the time on writing this comment, but somehow i’m still curious why you still continue with the fake publicity, even you noticed in the last 3-5 years that it doesnt work.
REBOL 2 contains third party code and it would take too much time and effort to open source it. It was apparently quite a legal effort to open source REBOL 3.
Cipri – you now clearly confirmed, that you are mostly a troll. You put in strong claims here, with clear evidence, that you have absolute zero Rebol or even technical related knowledge and you are just trolling.
Tech industry plays the alpha, beta, production game. I now even more realise, with such idiotic reaction as yours, why I value Carl Sassenrath’s work – his alpha SW might be some other project nearly production state SW.
Do you know, that R3 actually has less tickets that R2? So why the call to open R2? So – if you are not informed, you better stay silent …
I am really fed-up with your reactions, when you pop up each time with negative reaction, each time some Syllable related news is published. You are like small spoiled child – so please – go grow up or do us a favor and find yourself a better place to play. Thanks …
I wouldnt bet my money related to the technical knowledge. I even have a diploma asserting my techinal knowledge 🙂
I spent a lot of time with rebol 2.
And have written all sort of applications like chat server and chat client for irc (and also with direct communication and using additional encryption).
With rebol 3 i could not do that much because the gui was not in a useable state by then. And I’m sure there are still good reasons why it’s called ALPHA.
my reactions are negative, because syllable comes up all the time with joke-articles, nothing of weight, nothing of own creation.
Come up finally with wifi support (which was promised by vanders in 2005 or 2006). Port Mesa, and hw graphics drivers, and I will be the first to congratulate you.
In the last years it hardly happened that syllable didnt write related to rebol, and in fact as far as i see rebol did not make any/considerable progress on syllable. You don’t have any gui bindings for rebol or red, and i can bet that even in 5 years from now you wont have functional gui bindings for syllable. And this is because syllable awaits a miracle instead of doing real work.
I would understand it, if rebol itself would write the news about opening the sources. But why syllable? Should haiku announce the updates of mesa, just because mesa runs on haiku? Hello??
In one article syllable was even telling us that red runs on ubuntu, how great!
the progress on syllable desktop in the last years, is that incredible small, but instead of working on core syllable desktop, we get such fake articles, just for the sake of being on osnews.
I ported Mesa two years ago or so, it’s in Syllable 0.6.7. Vanders never promised wifi, we merely discussed it. The rest of your “info” is also misinformation.
Well, wifi was not only discussed it was intended in 2007 as a x-mas present for 2008, or something like that.
And related to mesa3d:
my sincer congratulations for porting it.
But too bad that your port of mesa is not complelte in the sense that it doesnt “print on the screen” according to your own documentation. So I have some little doubts about how well mesa is tested on syllable if you dont have a direct visual output. This is some kind of mesa for blinds.
You could have a good occupation for the next decade: Bring mesa to the screen, and then see if indeed mesa is working correctly, and integrate it in the syllable api.
But surprize, there are very bad chances this to happen, because for that you need to know the appserver, and there is hardly someone left in the so called “syllable team”, who has good knowledge related to the appsever (Vanders is inactive for years, Arno is gone, Rick is gone, and Dee seems to be occupied with pyro).
So yes, you have a good occupation for the next decade.
One could wish hw acc. graphics drivers too, but indeed that’s too much even if you are an optimist.
in short again:
if you have good news related to syllable development i’m happy to read it, but seeing that you come up that often with fake news, that are not really that much related to syllable, is somehow annoying, and seeing all the screenshots that are the same as in previous “syllable news”.
You’re delusional. But of course, you want to be.
*Someone* is delusional for sure. But I won’t get in to a pissing contest with you. But, Kai, most of what Cipri is saying seems pretty on the nose to me. Not about promised features, but about fake news and lack of development of the core Desktop OS. And for the record, a port isn’t a port if it doesn’t actually work as intended. Mesa isn’t ported to Syllable if it doesn’t actually render graphics.
The source repositories of the work presented here are openly available. Haven’t you noticed the name on much of the work on particularly Red, or do you choose to ignore it?
With regards to Syllable, RED is about as interesting as an anal exam to most actual users. Wifi, 3d, improvements to the networking, printer drivers, graphic drivers – these are interesting. Faddy programming language that has been justified by grafting it in to as many places in the OS as possible – no one but yourself really cares.
All is well, then. I’m making Syllable for myself, and I owe you nothing. I implement the features that I need, and I give them freely to the world. If anyone else wants other features, they’re free to implement and contribute them. It’s called open source.
And therein lies the problem. You should be making Syllable for users (which was always the original direction), and making it for yourself alienated most developers that might otherwise help. Vicious circle, your own doing. Don’t ever complain that people throw hate in your direction when you can’t even help yourself by catering to end users.
You reverse what happened. I worked for years to facilitate the original Syllable community. Then some people such as yourself went poisonous and tried to sabotage our work. We were forced to decide that we were not doing it for that part of the “community”, but for ourselves and for the constructive part of the community.
Since Syllable is an open source project, the malcontents are free to fork the project. In fact, they did, sort of, and this turned out to be the extent of their capabilities:
http://pyro-os.org
Since you know everything better, you are free to join them.
when i started the discussion by then it was with a good intention, because at that time stagnating and I didnt understand what was going on, and everybody was silent. Just later I understood, that already at this point it was already too late for syllable. In fact there would have been a little chance in that moment of the discussion. At that moment most devs except you, vanders and necroromancist…. where already not supporting you anymore.
You gave youself the title of “co-leader” (next to vanders), even nobody has elected you. Your work was mostly related to scripting and applying the patches of the others, and you stared to imagine that you are a great developer and need to decide the direction of syllable.
Kaj, i dont want to harm you feelings, but as a scripting guy, it’s very unlikely that c++ devs, kernel devs, filesystem engineers,… will pop up to follow you and saying:”scripting guy, tell us what to do next.”
Even if you can find “long term followers”, they will be of about your own skill, or inferior. And with such a “team” of course you can’t get anywhere.
The other strategy can be of course to borrow as much as possible from linux, but since syllable is quite buggy and misses a lot of “instrastructure”…. the amount and quality of the ported software is (mathematically speaking) bounded.
related to pyro:
I must admit i tried to tell the people from pyro (syllable fork), that it has not much sense to fork a system like syllable that is not in clean compileable state, that is missing a lot of features, buggy, etc…. when they could have forked haiku, which has all goals of syllable (and from which syllable itself tries to copy, or to be compatible with), and which is in a much more advanced state beating syllable in every domain even at scripting (well, except perhaps at… wallpapers, syllable is better at this, since it seems they also put more effort in wallpapers than haiku).
But they insisted on syllable, and to me this behaviour seems like blind syllable-love.
Now kaj, finally, you are the king of syllable, the only problem is that the castle is broken and the servants are gone, and you need to live on credit and it’s unsure for how long you can hide that the king is bankrupt.
I have no problem with syllable, but i would like to see real news about syllable and not this kind of fake news, because it reminds me that once, many years ago syllable the little os with a big future, and now it’s clinically dead since years popping up with fake news.
If you dont have technical improvements to report, then instead of such fake news, i would really love to see honest interviews with vanders related to technical stuff related to syllable (e.g. he could explain how a native syllable driver differs from a linux one, etc.), related to his decission to step back from syllable. There is a lot of interesting information related to syllable/atheos/pyro that would make a nice read and from whoes history we all could learn something.
So let’s see… Syllable was great. I was worthless. All the devs left because worthless me was somehow able to chase them away. The devs were united in their disgust of me, so they forked Syllable into Pyro. Seeing that only worthless me was subtracted from the Syllable project, Pyro went on to become a great success and conquer the world.
Hmm, somehow that doesn’t add up.
Happy Xmas to you, too.
Now, you’re getting ahead of your self. OS development is hard work. You’d already know this had you actually done any. We’ll worry about being a great success & taking over the world AFTER we hammer this code into shape. When that’s done, maybe we’ll become a huge success, but there’s a lot of hard work between then & now. You & I (plus a lot of other people) intimately know that you were a huge part in the neglect of the codebase having features. It’s hard to understand why someone who wasn’t doing any of the coding had so much ‘NO’ power concerning certain things. You can only use that word so many times before people stop doing work. It’s clear from your attitude & behavior that you have absolutely ZERO leadership skills. However, all of that is besides the point. Instead of trying to push the focus of failure towards us, maybe you should work on your OS.
Dee, you’re in a worse state than I thought. You still don’t get it. You’re not getting Pyro to work because you tried to delete all my hard work from it. The fact that you simply deny my work tells a story in itself.
All these years you have been claiming that our decisions to use Linux and REBOL lead to no being said to native Syllable work, but despite my repeated asking you have failed to come up with even one actual example. Maybe you can give one now?
Let’s get something straight, we’ve already replaced your cheap build system. Our build system works. We already have Pyro images. What’s a work in progress is a native GUI based installer. This is something that’s been on the Syllable roadmap, but has never had work started on it. Also, we’re replacing the chaos of sIDE, Catalog Editor, Sourcery, & any other stray tool that you guys have to string together with an actual full-fledged IDE. In addition, there’s the matter of improving the driver framework & writing new drivers. The issues we’re having have nothing to do with middleware scripting bullshit, we’re having issues because we’re addressing the parts that you seem to be ignoring –THE ACTUAL OPERATING SYSTEM. I suppose that you don’t have these issues, since you don’t do any operating system development or any native application development. Had you done any, you would’ve also come across missing or partially implemented functionality in libsyllable (which we’ve been addressing in libpyro). Also, you’d be a fool to think that the codebase at our website is an accurate representation of our state of affairs. We’re OS developers, not web developers. We’re also actively working on a port of git, so that we can to repo management natively from within Pyro, rather than from another host OS. So, if I’m so incompetent, why am I talking about actual OS development while you’re still gluing middleware into your OS & hoping for sympathetic developers to aid your cause? Perhaps you should mirror our approach – sit down, stfu, write some f’n OS code; it just might work out for you. Oh, wait, you don’t know how to do that…sucks for you!
By the way, Kaj, when’s Syllable’s acpi busmanager going to be finished? Will will your USB hid driver learn the difference between a keyboard/mouse & a joystick? We’ve already started addressing such issues. Users care about the repercussions of such things. Your curser shouldn’t get hijacked when a USB joystick is plugged in. Then again, I supposed it’s acting just like you…
You have a very strange idea of modern operating system development. Where is Pyro, then? As long as you don’t publish it, it’s just vapourware.
Vapourware, like Syllable 0.6.7??? We all know that all you really did was rebadge Syllable 0.6.6 as 0.6.7. Pyro will be released when it’s ready to be released, & not before that. I suppose Syllable 0.6.8 is when you’ll end up merging Server & Desktop? Not that there’ll actually be a real merge. More than likely, you’ll just toss Desktop & rebadge Server as both Server AND Desktop.
There’s no limit to the lies you will tell, is there? You know full well Syllable 0.6.7 is not 0.6.6. Several key additions in 0.6.7 won’t even run on 0.6.6, for example Red, as this very article tells you.
Oh, so Red is part of the actual OS? And if Red was stripped out, what’s the actual difference between 0.6.6 & 0.6.7??? What’s the difference between the core OS in each of those 2 versions??? Device drivers? Kernels? Servers? Unfortunately for you, most OSNews readers know better. Adding support for some obscure language doesn’t constitute bumping the version number of an OS release, regardless of how many different dialects of that language you support. Let me ask this question again, plainly: WHAT HAVE YOU CONTRIBUTED TO THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE ACTUAL OS, ITSELF???? NOT LANGUAGE BINDINGS, NOT WALLPAPERS, NOT WEBSITES; THE ACTUAL OS!!! Nothing??? Yeh, that’s what I thought. Go back & play in your sandbox, script kiddy!
You know, not one single Pyro developer has commented on this story. We’ve stood on the sidelines & occasionally glanced at the arguments thrown back & forth, but we didn’t get involved. In fact, since the fork, none of us have said anything negative to or about you. But now, you sit there & point at us in a mocking manner. However, you should know that we’re actually not doing worse than Syllable. We’re spending our time working on the actual OS, not on bullshit snatched from the far reaches of the web. Sure, defend your group, I can’t blame you for that. But don’t you dare try to do it at the expense of Pyro! We’re quiet, because we’re actually doing work. We’re actually trying to take what we forked & actually make it more usable. By looking at your repository, it might actually seem as if you’ve done a lot of work, since you do commits. But, let’s be honest here, you do commits to the core system for developers who don’t actually have commit access. Once again, you’re sitting here spreading lies about your developmental prowess, but nothing’s actually being accomplished. Also, if you ported Mesa3D, why are you using PicoGL running against SDL as your libGL.so??? Somehow, you think that putting EVERYTHING on top of SDL will solve all of your problems, but you’re sadly mistaken. I supposed you thought that you could create Syllable Server, & use it to control the direction of both Server AND Desktop. Unfortunately for you, you only succeeded in driving almost everyone away. Who knows, maybe the sun has set on Syllable Desktop, since you’re not a system developer.
You’ve made your bed, so now it’s time for you to lie in it, Kaj. You did this to yourself. Pyro WILL NOT take any of the heat for you. Instead, we’ll continue to work on improving the system. When we’re ready to make an announcement, we’ll do so. When we do so, it’ll be an announcement of substance, not smoke & mirrors.
The funny thing is that you used to talk about how far ahead of Haiku we were. The whole time, Haiku was blowing past us at lightening speed. Now, Pyro’s doing the same thing to Syllable. Hmmm…..I wonder…will you guys still be stuck using less than 2GB of system ram in 2015 or even 2020? Sure, it’s fine to have a system that can function with such limited ram; but, why should it have to???
You have a very selective memory. Do you call this staying quiet?
http://www.osnews.com/thread?488246
There are many others like it. Be a man and get your own fork to work, instead of bashing Syllable and me to hide your own incompetence.
So, you’re trying to use this as some kind of proof? A person defending himself from being dragged into bullshit that’s got YOU at the center of it? Your weak attempt is laughable. Every single time you attempt to drag us into your shit, we’ll defend ourselves & out you as the poser that you so clearly are. As far as getting my own fork, why don’t you get your own OS? You talk a big game in public, but all of us who were in the Syllable community know that you basically hijacked & siderailed Syllable’s development. You claim it as your own, but you’ve done virtually NOTHING to the actual OS itself. So, it looks like Ciprian was absolutely correct. As far as my own fork, I’m already a core developer of a fork, why would I fork it again?
Looking at the bickering between Syllable and Pyro camps, Haiku looks even better now… (with how friendly and lively it is)
I was referring to back when we were all Syllable developers. Well, all of us except for Kaj, who’s never actually developed an actual piece of Syllable. At that point, we hadn’t forked.
Yes, I was aware of what you were referring to. But the point is, right now Haiku looks even better (not only because of its progress in the meantime – also because there’s no arguing in public about it, like between you two)
Oh, and when you say that yo’re making it for you, talk about sitting on the shoulders of Giants!! You seem to have done very little that has actually improved the operating system, your work seems to consist mainly of Window dressing. Paper over the cracks and sell the house… nice strategy.
Let me state absolutely categorically: it was not, and I never made any such “promise” or even vague hints.
Well, i did a quick search. And didnt find a firm promise, but a vague hint i found in the mailing list:
From: Kristian Van Der Vliet <vanders@li…> – 2007-01-01 12:55
”
My crystal ball is hazy as I look into 2007, but hopefully we’ll see:
o WiFi support.
”
As far as I remember there was a more promising state for beginning of 2008 but didnt find it, i found just a post from myself from july 2007, where i was saying that “in vanders opinion we will have support for wifi at beginning of 2008”.
But the problem is, that the old syllable forum broke the new one has just the forum posts starting with september 2008. So I can not search for the reasons i made that statement in july 2007.
So far, this quick search could not prove my statement, but i guess a “vague hint” i could provide.
In the mailing list i found something else that is cute:
From: Kristian Van Der Vliet <vanders@li…> – 2005-12-31 14:22
It seems that all the rumor related to new years resolutions is true :-))
*rolls eyes* Yes, fine, obviously you know better than me about what I planned to do five years ago. Go you.
Strangely I couldn’t find any emails from yourself saying “Oh wow, I really want WiFi support, so I’ve started work on developing it!”. Strange, that.
Oh, come on Vanders… you are a god amongst men. The Bible is misquoted all of the time ;-P
I’m just wondering about the “why” of Syllable.
If you read its description it might as well be a Linux distribution. Apparently it will fine on old hardware, but even dual core machines are joining the pile of discard.
But Linux runs fine on old hardware too (just like *BSD) and Linux has a much broader software selection, support, acceptance. DOS, NT4, Win95/98 are also operating systems that work fine on a Pentium based PC.
I like operating systems, but I like them more if they are somewhat unique and with Syllable I’m just seeing a lot of stuff that’s common in the Linux world getting ported. So you’ll end up with a kind of Linux clone that is missing a lot of stuff that a real Linux install does have.
Once you start porting system stuff I think you need to wonder if you are still creating your own operating system or if you are just copying.
You only have to start Syllable once to experience that it’s not Linux. Why don’t you give it a try?
Syllable’s concept has always been to be an excellent base to port existing open source software on. Syllable is a complete stack of its own: kernel, driver framework, application server, multi-media server, user-space toolkit, and a collection of native apps. Around that skeleton, by now more than 99% of the code is ported. How do you suggest we arrive at end-user functionality if we would reinvent the wheel for everything?
I’m planning to give it a try. My attempt this morning failed, but that’s apparently because VirtualBox and Syllable isn’t a great match.
With regards to reinventing the wheel, there is a wheel and if too much stuff is just ported you end up with another wheel and then I wonder why bother if there already was a fine wheel. In this case the first wheel is called Linux.
Maybe I should try Syllable first, because now I see all these open source projects that are also on Linux, giving me the impression it’s all the usual suspects running on a different kernel.
There have been and are a number of “operating systems” that are just the Linux kernel, GNU stuff and then some small twist. If Syllable presents me with a bash shell and vi I will get a Linux feeling.
But okay, maybe I should try it first.
Again, Syllable Desktop is built on its own kernel, not the Linux kernel.
VirtualBox works, but needs to be configured right. Syllable doesn’t support SATA, so you need to set VB to an IDE disk.
Here’s an image in standardised OVF format, generated by VMware, if that helps:
https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B-dRFgFxR1iJOEtySWJ5NWFBMXc
…after a decade of SATA displacing IDE?
You do know that this is exactly how Linux got started, right? Porting software from Minix, GNU and other Unix operating systems?
Yes, I do, but Linux filled a space: a UNIX like system on home computer hardware. Minix wasn’t up for it and real UNIX wasn’t either.
A new operating system, like Syllable, needs to (IMHO) offer more than just being fast on an old computer. For a computer to be useful you need applications and if these are just Firefox, OpenOffice and the usual others I wonder why not just install Linux.
What I personally would like to see is an operating system that operates in a new and original way, with it’s own original software. Sure stuff can be ported too, but in addition to original software. Microsoft Office for Windows and for Mac are different yet somewhat the same.
Syllable has its own kernel and file system, that’s a nice thing for starters. But for a user that’s behind the scenes stuff, if all it does is run Firefox it might as well be a Linux distribution.
I wonder also if the goal, to be a fast user friendly desktop OS, is a realistic one if you can’t sync your iPhone to it, run the latest version of Flash, use all the features of a desktop printer or do other modern things.
Considering the competition in that area of Windows, OS X and Linux it will never capture much of a user base.
Apparently it once started as an AmigaOS clone. If they’d stuck with that it would have been a more unique goal. Still a small following, but it would not be in the same pond as Windows, OS X and Linux.
That’s exactly what Syllable is. As I said, it has a collection of native applications that you won’t find anywhere else, and it has a software development environment that’s easier than many others so you can develop more native applications of your own.
In addition, there’s ported software, but you seem to contradict yourself on that. Would you rather not have ported software be available, or would you want the operating system to be unable to get software ported?
It’s okay to have some stuff ported. The Amiga had WordPerfect, OS X has Microsoft Office, but these were/are not exact ports. Also both systems had a lot of unique software.
It would a shame really if everything on Syllable were exact ports.
I can’t get the image to work, although if I play around with the settings I can get it to freeze different ways during boot. I’ll try it on a real computer at home.
Your best quick bet is the live CD on real hardware, or running the install CD on a VirtualBox with an IDE disk, using the VirtualBox install option. It needs special Syllable kernel settings.
Yes, in the sense, that Notepad is easier than Microsoft Office 2013.
Oh God,
if they’re developing this, they surely got the point.
If you don’t get their point this doesn’t mean they don’t have one.
I don’t know. A programming language where:
1 + 2 * 3
evaluates to 9 is fail to me.
My “The C Programming Language, Second Edition” falls open at page 53, where the precedence table of operators is. When I program in C, I often need to refer to it, because it’s too complex to remember. Much C code acknowledges that by not even relying on precedence, but littering expressions with parentheses to make them unambiguous.
This problem doesn’t exist in REBOL and Red, because they have only two simple precedence rules:
– Operators evaluate from left to right.
– Infix operators take precedence over prefix functions.
If you want * to take precedence over +, you can simply write
1 + (2 * 3)
However, as a REBOL programmer you quickly get used to writing it as
2 * 3 + 1
That’s either genius or the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen.
Edited 2012-12-20 13:20 UTC
You just gotta get used to it, that’s all. It’s simpler for the interpreter to handle.
It’s a pattern that people can’t see the difference. 🙂 Otherwise, it wouldn’t be outstanding.
I understand why you’d do that, but… I’d have the reverse problem. I’d have to constantly be rearranging any REBOL code I wrote because I would have written it expecting precedence (which comes naturally to me because I have a strong background in math.)
No, you can just add parentheses, as I showed.
Which in a nitpicky sense is rearranging. However, I meant more that if “3*2+1” is the preferred pattern and I’m writing “1+2*3” then I’ll be rearranging all the time.
In your head, yes. But that’s exactly what programming is: rearranging thoughts all the time.
Many of the people who use REBOL have strong math backgrounds. They’re not hindered by REBOL’s precedence rules. In fact, REBOL has a math-like elegance to it.
One way to look at it is that a math background should make you a more flexible thinker. When you start a math assignment, you first have to define the rules of the system in which you will calculate. Different math systems have quite different rules. It shouldn’t be a big stretch to define different rules for operator precedence.
It’s great how you try to sell a bug or missing features, as something great.
It’s great to see how afraid you are that we will be successful. 🙂
Ideally, yes I can adapt to any system you could propose. The question is: Why should I?*
C works well, it’s not my favorite language; but it gets the job done and I’ve never found it necessary to look at precedence rules in C while writing (but then again C was my first language.)
Now that said, having strict left to right precedence would be a better system then math’s. Just try to convince the mathematicians of that.
*NOTE: I probably will try out REBOL when I find time to, but your argument “just get used to it” is very weak and deserves addressing on principle.
I find it interesting that there is now a discussion on math precedence, which is usually not an issue for those who try REBOL.
There is not some grand scheme at work here. REBOLs design is based on pragmatically solving general problems, not to build on or tweak the conventions of other languages.
REBOLs form of math precedence happens to reduce the number of rules to remember to a single left to right rule.
So your justification that Rebol has a strange behaviour because C has also a strange (different) behaviour??
Both are wrong IMHO: the best behaviour is: associativity as in math for + – * / and for all the other operators Rebol behaviour.
That’s an interesting idea, which would indeed fit best with common people’s experience. The nice thing about REBOL is that it’s a meta language: you have control over how the language is evaluated. REBOL makes it easy to write an expression evaluator that would use the rules you stated. I would indeed implement such an evaluator if I would allow users to enter their own expressions, for example in a calculator application.
I absolutely disagree. There are 2 choices to my mind:
1. Use standard precedences for arithmetic, comparison and logic operators as defined in common mathematical usage.
2. Have everything use standard precedences.
C’s implementation is actually flawed – Ritchie himself acknowledges so (http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/chist.html), so blindly copying that seems the wrong approach.
From the horses’ mouth, so to speak, on math precedence in REBOL:
http://www.rebol.com/r3/docs/concepts/math-precedence.html
Your link’s dead, but you can get to it here:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:cm.bell-labs.c…
The only issue I can find in the document is that boolean and bitwise operators have a somewhat weird relationship (boolean comes before bitwise.) The example being:
if((a&mask)==b)
the second set of parenthesis are required.
So you never learned any of the mnemonics for operator precedence? Or indeed had to learn in in school, or where it is still very much needed in real life?
If you start with the assumption that unary operators come first, and comparison and logical operators come at the end, then the old saw of My Dear Aunt Sally (multiplication, division, addition, subtraction) holds.
Or like how people do with real math, or have to do in REBOL to make sure the intent is clear?
I am not impresses with this argument. I have met many die hard proponents of Smalltalk, APL, Lisp, and Forth — and with the exception of Forth — none of them have actually claimed that the precedence in their language was somehow better. Instead they would say something like “well the operator precedence is a bit funky, but that is a consequence of how the language works, you will get used to it”
I will end as a general thought: It’s ok to admit the flaws of something you love. It isn’t somehow admitting defeat. Nothing that is useable in the real world is perfect. Nor in promoting your thing, do you need to talk down something else.
There are many flaws in REBOL, but this is not one of them. We’re fixing many of the other flaws in Red, but we’re pleased with the default expression precedence as it is.
As I noted before, REBOL makes it easy to implement your own expression evaluator with different precedence when you want.
There are a few languages that don’t follow traditional mathematical precedence: Smalltalk, APL, REBOL, Forth, Lisp, and others.
From an end user perspective, Rebol’s graphical widgets are a bit oudated and sucks, I think they should update the visual appeal surfing today’s polishness Windows 8 and other minimal graphic interfaces show.
We are working on this actually right now, so we hope it will be a bit nicer looking over the next 3-6 months.
I have no skin in this game, the last time I touched REBOL was years ago and I saw what was unique and interesting about it, but didn’t end up caring much about it. I suppose I could say the same thing about Syllable for that matter, but that isn’t my point.
Yes, I get that there is a high concordance between REBOL folk and Syllable folk, so it is good news for that community, but it isn’t their news.
Surely the point of this story is that REBOL is being open sourced, and that is where the credit should go — to Carl Sassenrath and anyone else who was involved in open sourcing the language.
Who really cares if the Syllable folk predicted that it would be open sourced? And if if you look at the time between the prediction and it happening it wasn’t an especially on the nose prediction either. Nor is that the relevant bit of the story, and yet it is presented as the lead.
Let us give credit where credit is due.
In no way do we claim credit for open sourcing REBOL. It doesn’t say that in the article, either. The article isn’t purely about the open sourcing news, it’s about the fact that we integrated it in our Syllable processes. The REBOL project could have sent in their own announcement, but they didn’t in the week since the release, and we wouldn’t have expected them to, because they’re not paying much attention to publicity.
The relevancy of the REBOL announcement to Syllable, besides the integration work, is that it is of strategic importance. We selected it for Syllable’s cross-platform groupware strategy in 2005, based on its technical merits, and the fact that Syllable’s app platform is Syllable-only, so it can’t be used for cross-platform technology. This was a controversial thing to do, because Syllable is open source and REBOL wasn’t. Besides technical merit, we did it because we expected REBOL to be open sourced eventually, and we expected to be able to work towards it using open source REBOL clones in the meantime. This is exactly what we did, although it was a somewhat chaotic path: we used the R#, ORCA and Boron REBOL-like languages successively. The open sourcing of REBOL itself marks the end of this journey, together with the fact that Red is the first REBOL-like design that is superior to REBOL itself.
Since there has been much controversy about our strategy including here on OSNews, we didn’t want these two milestones to go by unnoticed.
We do claim credit for most of the contributions to Red besides the language itself:
http://www.red-lang.org/p/contributions_20.html
And others mentioned in the article. Thus they are contributed to Red by the Syllable project. We also did the port of Red to Syllable, and we developed the port of Red/System to Syllable together with others in the Red project. This way, Red will become an integral part of Syllable and therefore, most work on Red is also work on Syllable.
Nor did I say, or imply that you did. Merely that your lead:
wasn’t your (meaning Syllable’s) news, you buried the lead.
A better headline might have been have been:
Though personally I think that is way too many stories to put in one piece. Again personally, I think that it would have been better to have one story announcing the open sourcing of REBOL 3 — aside from the article back in Sep saying that REBOL 3 would be open sourced there has been a story here about the actual release of the source — and then a separate Syllable related one.
Nor (once again) personally do I think the prediction bit was relevant to the story.
It is fine if you disagree (you wrote the story you wanted to write), I am just pointing out that I think it would have been better expressed by giving REBOL the credit for the open sourcing before you emphasize the the Syllable part.
Actually, that’s pretty much what I did on our own site:
http://web.syllable.org/news/2012-12-19-01-42-Open-sourced-REBOL-3-…
http://web.syllable.org/news/2012-11-18-20-47-Red-high-level-progra…
I wrote an extended version of the first Red article for OSNews that happened to fall in the first day or so of Thom’s vacation. When he returned, the article was dropped for reasons unknown to me. Then the next Red release happened almost together with the REBOL release, so I was forced to combine the two news items.
Well, seems that’s what the “syllable team” did in the past few years…. predictions and plans.
To be honest, core syllable lacks a lot of stuff.
Syllable has a “malnourished” core, which made as good as no progress in the last 3-5 years, the api is missing a lot of features and is quite buggy or even unfinished (e.g. the layoutmanager,…)
Instead of improving core syllable (e.g. the media kit is unfinished and buggy) and being up-to-date with the neccessary developer tools (at least a recent gcc).
Instead you have… rebol plans and predictions.
Good, but i must admit i don’t know the internals of rebol, but imagine a nice situation:
what if in future the rebol interpreter will need a more recent compiler (e.g. they could use a useful c++11 feature).
Even if rebol will get out of this alpha phase some day, it’s very unlikely that syllable will have a complete port, since the media-kit, opengl/mesa..etc are in a unfinished state.
Instead of building and improving the syllable “infrastructure”, syllable was making rebol plans and predictions.
REBOL is written in very standard C, because it needs to run on systems and compilers much older than Syllable. For example, Amiga OS is supported.
Furthermore, Red is its own compiler toolchain, so it is completely independent from any external compiler such as GCC.
And yes, Syllable is a development project. Nobody ever claimed it to be finished, and the most interesting thing about it is that anybody can help move it along.
Sorry to be blunt, but Syllable OS has been dead for years. Everyone knows this, except Kaj.
Enough of this necromantic propaganda, which is only a waste of time.
I must be living in a ghost house, then. 🙂 My whole house is running on Syllable.
Ironically, today a friend asked me what language/sdk/api to use to write a little program. My first idea for windows was… qt, then i was thinking… wait… rebol could be enough. So download again r3 alpha after a long time, to see if they did some progress and if it’s enough for my friend.
So i looked up again the syntax for creating a gui, to be sure to write it correctly. Somehow it didnt work. Then at the end of the documentation i see written:
[q]
More to come…
This is just a start. I’ll be adding more very soon.
-Carl March 2010
[\q]
Great, 3 years later, it’s still not working. R3 is really still not able to create a gui?
Here’s the version of REBOL 3 with GUI:
http://www.saphirion.com/development/downloads-2/
It’s linked from the Syllable development site:
http://development.syllable.org/main.html
Note that GUI docs may be outdated. They will be updated in the coming months.
Ah, very nice. Now it’s really a time for me to cool down to Scheme and Forth, and learn Rebol
P.S.: These are also great news for Syllable project, since REBOL may now become one of the main languages for Syllable OS.