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Playing with REBOL

Yesterday, inspired by Keith’s Programming page, I decided to take a look at REBOL. REBOL is a very high level scripting language designed for working with the internet. It has the interbnet built in to its very core—its 45 core datatypes include email addresses and URIs and it includes support for 14 standard protocols including HTTP, FTP, POP and even finger.

The language itself is impressively expressive. A classic example is the following one-liner, which retrieves the contents of a web page and emails it to a specified address:

send fred@example.com read http://www.rebol.com/

While the core of REBOL is closed source (and looks set to remain that way) implementations are available for 40 different platforms and the language has an developed a large community. I’ve hardly scratched the surface of the capabilities of the language—the GUI stuff in particular is very impressive. Also worth a look is Simple Content Management on ALA, which demonstrates how REBOL can be used to construct a simple, template based offline content management system.

Posted 31st March 2003 at 11:42 pm

This is Playing with REBOL by Simon Willison, posted on 31st March 2003.

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3 comments

  1. REBOL is pretty cool. I use it for all these little tasks, since one-liners like the one you mentioned (and other similarly short scripts) are so easy.

    Unfortunately, I'd be much more hyped about the language in general if the implementation was open-source. The free version is crippled (you can't call out to shell commands, or access databases, for instance). The "pro" version has this stuff. Nothing wrong with them making a buck, of course, but it makes the language less attractive to me. It's a shame, too, because a lot of what they've done is pretty innovative, and their /View dialect allows you to make cross-platform GUIs on SO many platforms.

    *Way* back in the beginning (well, when I was first learning about it anyway, soon after version 2 was released, I think), they were talking about maybe open-sourcing it some day. I hope they're still considering that for the long-term.

    Keith - 1st April 2003 03:24 - #

  2. Funny you mention REBOL today. I heard about it a couple years ago, but just 3 or 4 days ago I decided I might want to look into getting familiar with it.

    Devon - 1st April 2003 08:39 - #

  3. The free version is no longer crippled, at least in the beta test versions. The Call verb is supported for shellinh

    http://www.rebol.net/projects/view1.3/downloads/

    Also worth a read -- Carl Sassenrath's (the inventor of REBOL) blog:

    http://www.rebol.net/blog/carl.html

    Gill - 15th October 2004 11:37 - #

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