Red Programming Language 0.5.4 released

http://www.red-lang.org/2015/06/054-new-datatypes-exceptions-and-set.html

by 0x1997 • 11 years ago

58 23 11 years ago

Immortalin• 11 years ago

Red could potentially become a really good platform for popularizing lisp since it's cross-platform, have a logo-like syntax and is compiled fully to machine code. Someone should write a Go to Red transpiler as it would be a really a good way to increase the amount of libraries Red currently has since Go seems to be a really good language to target due to its consistency and simplicity. My only gripe with it is that it feels too "big".

jlarocco2• 11 years ago

I'm not sure I understand your comment.

Specifically, Red is a dialect of Rebol, not Lisp. And after a quick glance through the docs (or I guess the Rebol docs they recommend using), and the Wikipedia pages for Red and Rebol, it doesn't seem any more Lispy than Ruby or Python.

Also, the easiest way to get a lot of libraries would be to have easy C interop. At this point there are far more C libraries available than Go libraries.

klibertp• 11 years ago

it doesn't seem any more Lispy than Ruby or Python

Homoiconic syntax is one of the features of Lisp that people know the best. REBOL and Red are homoiconic, while Ruby and Python are not. This means that syntactic extension, which is impossible in Python and Ruby without modification of the parser, is easy to do in those languages. The other similar language (besides Lisp and REBOL/Red, excluding Forth and some more esoteric langs) is Tcl: it's also homoiconic and enables easy syntactic extension.

greggirwin3• 11 years ago

Red isn't a dialect of Lisp, nor exactly of Rebol. Red is descended from Rebol, and the two are very compatible. Rebol, in turn, has its heritage in Lisp, Forth, and Logo, with prototype objects as in Self. Both the Red and R3 teams see compatibility as a good thing going forward.

And you have C interop today, though it will get easier in the future.

rajadigopula• 11 years ago

Just when the world is getting ready for IOT. Might have the potential to become the Javascript for IOT devices for it's low footprint and highly embeddable nature.

kseistrup3• 11 years ago

“For Linux 64-bit distros, you need to install 32-bit supporting libraries.”

Does that go for the binary distribution only, or also if you want to compile the source yourself?

iceflow195• 11 years ago

The compilers for Red and Red/System are written in Rebol2. The binary distribution is just an encapsulated Rebol interpreter with source code. Rebol2 needs the 32-bit supporting libraries.

kseistrup3• 11 years ago

Oh, ok. So Rebol2 isn't compilable on a 64-bit machine? Too bad.

zeeone• 11 years ago

Red seems like a very ambitious project to be completed by a single developer. I've only briefly looked at the syntax, but it seemed to me that it's not very clear. The excess use of brackets is visually confusing.

Zelphyr• 11 years ago

Its an Open Source project and, while it could use more developers I'm sure (most OSS projects could), it is definitely not only being worked on by one developer.

Once you start writing in it you realize how much the syntax often reads like an English sentence. And the brackets make perfect sense when you begin to understand blocks. And besides; its no more than curly braces in C and definitely fewer than parentheses in Lisp.

ignorabilis• 11 years ago

Parenthesis in Lisp are not more than those in C. It's just that there is only one type of parenthesis and the accepted convention is to pile all the closing ones at the last line. When you have some time play with them in both C and Lisp and count them.

greggirwin3• 11 years ago

Red was a single, primary developer (with some ancillary support) for some time, but that is no longer the case: http://www.red-lang.org/2015/01/dream-big-work-hard-and-make...

Too many brackets is rarely the initial complaint. Usually people complain about the lack of parens in function calls. Free-ranging evaluation is an important design element, but it can take some getting used to. One of those "With great power..." things.

iceflow195• 11 years ago

The syntax is minimalist for a reason. The primary paradigm of languages in the Rebol family (like Red) is language-oriented programming of which creating domain specific languages in an important factor. The more minimalist the base syntax the less you force the end-user into a syntactic corner, when they go to design their own DSL's. As for blocks (those things delimited by brackets) they're technically a data-structure (actually all code is an implicit data structure). In Rebol for example all the typical control flow structures are actually functions which take as arguments vectors of code.

mc_hammer• 11 years ago

everything but sliced bread. looks very good.

jamii• 11 years ago

Red/System is interesting - http://static.red-lang.org/red-system-specs.html#section-1 - a similar approach to Lua/Terra - http://terralang.org/

hamdouni• 11 years ago

The binaries produced by red compiler are really very small. With an IOS and Android target, it can be a very interesting choice to mobile apps. And writing code in red seems very concise. It's like having the expressiveness of a functional language and the efficiency of a compiled one.

Red Programming Language 0.5.4 released

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