Dr. Dobb's is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.


Channels ▼
RSS

Loose Ends


WebReview.com: Loose Ends

A couple of my columns toward the end of last year provoked questions that I really should answer here and now, to tie up the loose ends of 1998. There are essentially two questions:

The Rebol programming language sounds interesting, but why would I want to use it instead of, say, Python?

and:

Swaine, you ignorant heathen, don't you realize that the millenium bug is really a centennial bug and would cause trouble even if this were only a century rollover that we were approaching rather than a millenium tick; and that the millenium doesn't even come on January 1, 2000 but on January 1, 2001; and that changing the calendar or converting to Zoroastrianism or whatever wouldn't solve the problem anyway?

To the latter I say: "Yes, I know that." I might even add: "Doh!"

To answer the former, I went to the source: The developers of Rebol. Here's what they said, rephrased in my words so that I can feel like I'm earning my pay:

  • Rebol was created to be a network messaging language, rather than a system scripting language like Python. It was specifically designed to handle the passing of messages over the Internet and other such heterogenous, distributed environments.
  • Rebol is platform independent. Python is not.
  • Rebol is a context-sensitive language; Python is context-free. That's a distinction from language theory that is more often invoked by linguistics professors than computer programmers; in practice, what it means is that Rebol can often infer context that programmers using Python and most other languages would have to supply explicitly.
  • And Rebol is 250K. Python is 2.3 megs. So you can easily download Rebol. Since it's free, I recommend you do, and take a look at it.

Finally, in that same spirit of tying up loose ends, and in the timeworn tradition of making New Year's resolutions, I hereby resolve not to pass on to you any more unsubstantiated rumors from Robert X. Cringely. Unless they're really, really juicy.

-oo-


Mike is the co-author of Fire in the Valley, the definitive history of the personal computer.


Previously in Swaine's Frames

Toward the Year Zero
Browsers Go Bizarro
Stand Up for Human Rights


Related Reading


More Insights






Currently we allow the following HTML tags in comments:

Single tags

These tags can be used alone and don't need an ending tag.

<br> Defines a single line break

<hr> Defines a horizontal line

Matching tags

These require an ending tag - e.g. <i>italic text</i>

<a> Defines an anchor

<b> Defines bold text

<big> Defines big text

<blockquote> Defines a long quotation

<caption> Defines a table caption

<cite> Defines a citation

<code> Defines computer code text

<em> Defines emphasized text

<fieldset> Defines a border around elements in a form

<h1> This is heading 1

<h2> This is heading 2

<h3> This is heading 3

<h4> This is heading 4

<h5> This is heading 5

<h6> This is heading 6

<i> Defines italic text

<p> Defines a paragraph

<pre> Defines preformatted text

<q> Defines a short quotation

<samp> Defines sample computer code text

<small> Defines small text

<span> Defines a section in a document

<s> Defines strikethrough text

<strike> Defines strikethrough text

<strong> Defines strong text

<sub> Defines subscripted text

<sup> Defines superscripted text

<u> Defines underlined text

Dr. Dobb's encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task. However, Dr. Dobb's moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing or spam. Dr. Dobb's further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

 
Disqus Tips To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy.