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Red Programming Language 0.5.4 released

red-lang.org

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Re: Red Programming Language 0.5.4 released

#2

Post by Immortalin »

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".

Re: Red Programming Language 0.5.4 released

#6

Post by jlarocco »

Immortalin wrote: post #2

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…

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.

Re: Red Programming Language 0.5.4 released

#8

Post by klibertp »

jlarocco wrote: post #6
Immortalin wrote: post #2

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…

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 G…

> 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.

Re: Red Programming Language 0.5.4 released

#9

Post by Zelphyr »

zeeone wrote: post #5

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.

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.

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