Red console view GUI

This is a simpler example to paste into a Red console to test the GUI basics of using the view dialect.

view [
    below
    tgl: text "Some test text"
    text 400x30 bold italic blue font-size 16 "Text with properties"
    button "Click Me" [tgl/text: "Text Changed!"]
    field 400 "SELECT this text then Type something into this entry field"
    area 400x200
]

A Red script might declare that it needs the view module in its header.

The above script was tested with the Feb 19 2016 build of Red.

Visual Prolog 7.3

Prolog Development Center has just released version 7.3 of Visual Prolog.

VIP was once known as Borland Turbo Prolog and was one of my favorite tools alongside Borland C++ for OS/2.

PDC Prolog has its counterpart in the Mercury project: a typed Prolog.

So what is new in 7.3? Well, Visual Prolog is getting ready to go 64-bit.  That and more are detailed at the 7.3 page.

For a while I thought the Prolog would go behind the scenes at PDC as it did when Air Liquide acquired Prologia in France (the home of Prolog IV as CLP.)   Happily PDC now is back to showcasing at least AI and not just smart software applications.

But what will the fate of this Prolog prove to be?  In a decade or two, projects such as Oz and Mercury may be in other hands - but a small commercial venture?

In my experience the strength of Visual Prolog was not the IDE or the GUI-building tools but the debugging.  And that has been further strengthened in the 7.3 release.

There is a "personal version" available for download and extensive examples come with it.

Prolog is part of the Adobe world in the ILOG arena (an IBM acquisition) and in an age of multi-processor 64-bit hardware, Prolog should come into its own in the RDF processing needs of the semantic web (in which regard, see Logtalk and the XSB project as well as http://www.swi-prolog.org/ for alternatives to PDC.)

A typed-Prolog should present no problem to ActionScript Flex developers at home with a typed ECMAScript variant - and "declarative" MXML UI layout.

Other languages superbly suited to processing text: ObjectIcon, Icon 9.5, Rebol, Oz.

Other Prolog implementations of merit: Eclipse-housed AMZI! Prolog.

For OOP for almost any other Prolog than PDC, see http://www.logtalk.org/

When the ICON language was named, Ralph Griswold could not have suspected that computing would come to have an "iconic" interface.  Curl has suffered a similar fate due to haxx.se and cURL.  Sadly, XML has a "prolog" and not a "prologue" so without RDF, searching for news on Prolog and XML is vexing.  So far, Rebol fares best and Oz much better.  As for Mercury and Alice, what's in a name?

http://www.logiquewerks.com/index.html

exposing slim Liquid Rebol

The dataflow framework for Rebol is called Liquid and is available from rebol.org as a SLiM library.

If you are new to this as I am, it is not obvious how to proceed.

First you need both slim.r and liquid.r

Slim can be found at rebol.org in the scripts.
You can download liquid or retrieve it from the Rebol console by visiting Liquid
to either get the file or run the one-line script at the Rebol console.

Start by loading SLiM with

do %slim.r

and then try

do %liquid.r

The important liquid function is liquify. An attempt at

source liquify

or

help liquify

will show that nothing is yet available.

Start by checking the SLiM paths with

slim/paths

which should be an empty block.

I am using local code (liquid.r and slim.r are in my Rebol directory) so I just do this:

slim/paths: [%.]

Now I check my SLiM path to liquid this way:

slim/find-path %liquid.r

which gives me my Rebol path.
Now I can do the two key bits:

lq: slim/open 'liquid none ; gets any version

and then expose that lq library with

slim/expose lq none ; replace none later with a blk of funcs

Now you can test with a simple test for the liquify true? function with

source true?

You are now ready to use the liquid documentation at Steel quickstart or the Steel Liquid page.