redirecting Rebol stdin/stdout under Windows

Rebol has a console interpreter which I wished to wrap in a smarter Win32 console shell that would screen my typical typo's, maintain a history across sessions and a few other useful features to exploit the Rebol parser.

My console wrappers at the moment are both Smalltalk console applications written in Dolphin Smalltalk: ConsoleShell and ConsolePipe. ConsoleShell understands commands for several language configurations and writes to a named pipe opened and echoed by ConsolePipe1; ConsolePipe2 takes STDOUT and pipes it to a chosen NamedPipe to feedback to an IDE running the ConsoleShell.

The problem that I faced was to pipe out from rebol.exe as it is not enough just to use the -w option to prevent a window from opening.

The answer lay in a Rebol script not unlike what you might use to loop a Perl interpreter. In my test case, the following pipeline works under Windows XP:

ConsoleShell | ConsolePipe1 | rebol.exe -w -c --do "forever [attempt [print do ask %~]]" 2>&1 | ConsolePipe2

The input is to my shell and the output appears in a destination window fed by a named pipe.
Unless you ran taskmgr you would not know that rebol.exe was running.

The two key bits are the -c flag and the print block. You also have to ignore the obvious and set the prompt ( in my case '->' ) with the '%' as indicated and you must wrap the script in dbl-quotes.

Now my ConsoleShell pipes into Rebol and Rebol outputs into my chosen Windows NamedPipe. This should work with any 2 wrappers - you might want to try with Tcl and expect. The Rebolution continues ...