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REBOL Babysteps - 01 Getting Started

Tags: rebol learn coolnamehere

Series: [REBOL Babysteps]

REBOL is the “Relative Expression-Based Object Language”, developed by Carl Sassenrath. Who is Carl Sassenrath? Why, he’s one of the people responsible for the amazing operating system which powered the Amiga computer. What’s the Amiga? Why, the Amiga was only the incredibly robust and cool computer — released by the same company that brought the world’s first personal computer, Commodore. What’s Commodore? Stop bothering me, kid. Take it from a relative old-timer: Amiga put a heck of a lot of power into a consumer-affordable personal computer. It wasn’t really matched by other computers for a good five or ten years. Nowadays, I look at REBOL and it feels like the first language I’ve come across to take lessons from past languages and apply them in a new context, rather than just reimplement them with different syntax.

So why would you want to learn REBOL? Because REBOL makes it frighteningly easy to create programs that accomplish complex tasks. For example, here’s one way you can download the HTML source of a Web page – for example https://randomgeekery.org/ – and view it in a text editing area with REBOL/View:

>> view layout [ area 800x600 read https://randomgeekery.org ]

This impresses me to no end. Maybe you’re not so impressed by it, but that’s okay. I’m happy, and that’s what I care about most.

These pages are intended to provide the non-programmer with a gentle introduction to the REBOL language and environment. When you are done with it, you should feel ready to learn more, and curious to dig into the possibilities. You won’t be an expert, but maybe you’ll feel bold enough to become one and share what you’ve found with the rest of the world. Beginners and experts alike should feel free to send suggestions about how I can improve this tutorial.

Installing REBOL

Installing REBOL is a straightforward task, as long as you are using one of the 40+ supported platforms.

Platform Notes

Installation on Windows

Installation on Linux

Here is what I had to do in order to get REBOL/Core and REBOL/View running on my Ubuntu laptop:

Why did I install both Core and View? There’s no real need to. I just prefer to include a version of REBOL that doesn’t depend on X libraries for scripting tasks that will never need a Viewtop. It’s particularly handy for Web programming tasks.

There’s an intermittent problem with ugly fonts when using View under Linux. I’ll post instructions for handling that on this site as soon as I find my notes.

Which Version?

You have a few different choices for what version of REBOL to download, depending on what you need and what is available for your platform.

REBOL/Core

http://www.rebol.com/prod-core.html

REBOL/Core covers the vital language features, including all the datatypes which make the language so attractive to somebody like me. With Core, you can create system shell scripts, CGI applications, or simple command-line applications. Core also provides an interactive shell for testing out code on the fly, which is a valuable asset for getting the hang of a language, or even just trying out an obscure bit of code on a bored Thursday evening.

Find out if REBOL/Core has been released for your platform at this URL:

http://rebol.com/platforms.html

REBOL/Core will probably do fine for most hobbyists, but you might want to look on if you enjoy pointy clicky GUI environments as much as I do.

REBOL/View

http://www.rebol.com/prod-view.html

View is the cool one, in my opinion. It adds an impressive GUI library to Core, making it immediately useful for a broad range of applications. The utility of View can be compared to Java, but here’s something to really think about regarding the contrast between View and Java. How big of a download is the JDK these days? 10 Megabytes, 40 Megabytes? The REBOL/View installer for Windows is 600 Kilobytes. You can fit it on a floppy disk.

What’s a floppy disk? I thought I told you to stop bothering me, kid.

Find out if REBOL/View has been released for your platform at this URL:

http://rebol.com/view-platforms.html

REBOL/SDK and REBOL/Command

These are also very easy to get, and add a number of useful features to REBOL/View. I’ll be ignoring them for now, because they have a dollar cost associated with them.

Using REBOL

In Windows, all you need to do is find REBOL in your Start menu. In Linux, it should be directly callable from your command line if you handled installation the same way I described.

$ rebol
REBOL/Core 2.7.6.4.2 (15-Mar-2008)
Copyright 2008 REBOL Technologies
REBOL is a Trademark of REBOL Technologies
All rights reserved.

Finger protocol loaded
Whois protocol loaded
Daytime protocol loaded
SMTP protocol loaded
ESMTP protocol loaded
POP protocol loaded
IMAP protocol loaded
HTTP protocol loaded
FTP protocol loaded
NNTP protocol loaded
>>

So double-click its icon or run it from the command-line. Either way, now the REBOL shell is running for you. If you’ve installed View, then you’ve got this pretty Desktop thing. We’ll have to come back to it some other time. For now, just click the icon on the left for “Console”. Now you’ve got the console. It is not as pretty, but it will work for our purposes.

You can also go straight to the console when executing rebview from the command line by using the -v option:

$ rebview -v

How to use REBOL/Core

Getting REBOL to do something for you is as simple as typing in the commands and looking at the results.

>> print "Hello, World!"
Hello, World!

See? Not that hard at all. Of course, this is pretty standard stuff from most programming languages these days. Well, except Java. But we all just sort of snicker whenever a Java coder enters the room. We would snicker more, but that Java coder is probably making twice what we are. He deserves it, too, for all the carpal tunnel he’s going to get when he tries to write a “Hello World” program.

Making the computer tell us things is kind of fun, but it would be nice to customize it a little bit. Let’s have the computer ask our name. We can use the ask function (or word) to ask a question and get a response, which we will save in a variable.

>> name: ask "Enter your name: "
Enter your name:

REBOL uses words to remember everything. These words can describe a number, your name, a chunk of programming logic, or pretty much anything else you want to track. Here, we have created a word name, and used the function described by ask to set name to whatever you enter as your name. What? You still haven’t done that? Go ahead, it’s painless.

>> name: ask "Enter your name: "
Enter your name: Brian
== "Brian"

Type in your name, whether it’s “Brian”, “Craig”, “Sarah”, or “Zuul the Destroyer”. Your name is immediately printed back out onto the console. But how do we know that REBOL has remembered it? Just print the name:

>> print name
Brian

That works, and is in the same spirit as the other tutorials on coolnamehere, but this seems like a great opportunity to take a look at the help word. help describes a function that can look up information about any word that REBOL is currently tracking. Here, try it for name:

>> help name
NAME is a string of value: "Brian"

You can get even more information when the word is pointing to a function or other complex datatypes. See what happens when you ask help about itself.

>> help help
USAGE:
    HELP 'word

DESCRIPTION:
     Prints information about words and values.
     HELP is a function value.

ARGUMENTS:
     word -- (Type: any-type)

Remember help. It may be just the thing you need when you’re confused by what a word is supposed to do. As an exercise, go ahead and starting by asking help about ask or print.

Let’s return to our tutorial, already in progress…

Now that we know REBOL has remembered the name, let’s print it as part of a sentence. You can tell print to print several things at once by putting them in a block. We do this by wrapping it in square brackets.

>> print [ "Hello" name "- good to see you!" ]
Hello Brian - good to see you!

Hey, that made me feel pretty good! As always, it’s great how much we can be cheered up by just a few nice words, even if we have to write them ourselves. What if we wanted to share that warm feeling with our friends and neighbors, or at least the ones who have a copy of REBOL on their machine?

Let’s find our how to do that.

How to make your own REBOL script

Using your favorite Editor, type this text in and save it as hello.r. I like to keep my code files in a special “projects” directory, to keep from losing them in a mass of articles, pictures, and random files. You might want to follow the same habit, but it’s entirely up to you.

REBOL [
   Title: "Hello User"
   File: %hello.r
]

name: ask "Please enter your name: "
print [ "Hello" name "- good to see you!" ]

Make sure that you are using an editor which saves its files as plain text. REBOL can’t make any sense of Word documents or HTML.

The Script Header

You recognize the code from before, but I imagine you’re curious about the block prefaced by the word REBOL. That is the script header, where you put important information about the script that you are writing. You need to put something, even if it’s just an empty block, or Rebol won’t recognize it as a script.

REBOL [ ]

Still, the whole point of a script header is to get information about what the script is, where it came from, and any other details which you think might be useful to somebody who uses it. An empty block is hardly useful. This is considered to be more of an acceptable minimal block for a script you want to share with the world:

REBOL [
    Title: "Hello User"
    Date: 22-Dec-2004
    File: %hello.r
    Author: "Brian Wisti"
    Version: 1.0.0
]

name: ask "Please enter your name: "
print ["Hello" name "- good to see you!"]

Of course, you could always provide more information if you want.

REBOL [
    Title: "Hello User Example Script"
    Date: 24-Feb-2009
    Name: 'Hello-User

    Version: 1.0.2
    File: %hello.r
    Home: http://randomgeekery.org/tags/rebol/

    Author: "Brian Wisti"
    Owner: "Brian Wisti"
    Rights: "Copyright (C) 2017 Brian Wisti"

    Needs: [] ; Needs nothing beyond REBOL/Core
    Tabs: 4

    Purpose: {
        This program is a simple script to demonstrate usage of
        REBOL and warm you up for trying more complex tasks.
    }

    History: {
        1.0.0 [22-Dec-2004 "Wrote the code"]
        1.0.1 [23-Dec-2004 "Finished writing the header for the code"]
        1.0.2 [24-Feb-2009 "Re-examined for site update"]
        1.0.3 [09-Apr-2017 "Adjusted for site relocation"]
    }

    Language: 'English
]

name: ask "Please enter your name: "
print ["Hello" name "- good to see you!"]

Just try to keep the size of the script header appropriate for the size of your script. A full script header might be overkill for a script with only two lines of code - unless you happen to think that people need a lot of information when handling your script.

Running your script

There are two ways to actually load your script and make it do its thing.

Actually, there are a couple more ways to go about it, but these are the main approaches if you are running a simple Rebol/Core script like the one we’ve written.

From the interactive console, I use the do command to execute the script C:\projects\hello.r:

>> do %\c\projects\hello.r

The first time you do this, REBOL might ask you for permission to run the script. Nothing to worry about, it’s just REBOL being conscious about security. Just say ``Yes’’, and the script will run through merrily.

>> do %hello.r
Script: "Hello User" (none)
Please enter your name: Brian
Hello Brian - good to see you!

If REBOL is in your path, you can call the rebol executable with your script name as an argument.

$ rebol hello.r
REBOL/Core 2.7.6.4.2 (15-Mar-2008)
Copyright 2008 REBOL Technologies
REBOL is a Trademark of REBOL Technologies
All rights reserved.

Finger protocol loaded
Whois protocol loaded
Daytime protocol loaded
SMTP protocol loaded
ESMTP protocol loaded
POP protocol loaded
IMAP protocol loaded
HTTP protocol loaded
FTP protocol loaded
NNTP protocol loaded
Script: "Hello User" (none)
Please enter your name: Brian
Hello Brian - good to see you!

Oof. That’s a whole lot of text before you actually see your program. Use the -q option to make REBOL run your script more quietly.

$ rebol -q hello.r
Please enter your name: Brian
Hello Brian - good to see you!

REBOL also supports the classic “shebang” line for UNIX shell scripts.

Cool, eh? Now you can share this script with all of your Rebol friends just by sending them the file. Of course, you might want to send them something more impressive, but think of it this way - this just gives you the motivation to learn how to do more!

Wrapping Up

There you have it. You’ve learned how to write a simple script. Heck, I’ve even snuck in a couple of Rebol’s many datatypes while you weren’t looking. You’re well on the way to becoming a real Rebol programmer!

There is a lot of documentation available for REBOL, especially considering that the REBOL community is fairly small. RT keeps the official manuals available for free, and there are loads of script libraries and how-to guides written by the users themselves.

http://www.rebol.com/docs.html

P.S.: What, you want me to tell you how to quit REBOL? Why would you ever want to do that? Oh, okay. The command to quit from the REBOL Console is easy to remember: quit. Happy now?

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Added to vault 2024-01-15. Updated on 2024-02-01