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HostileFork Blog
Personal blog · blog.hostilefork.comprogrammingsystems
HostileFork Blog is a personal blog at blog.hostilefork.com about programming and systems. Since 2014, 20 different Hacker News readers have linked it 31 times, most often “Why Rebol, Red, and the Parse Dialect Are Cool (2013)”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (19) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog for posts on Rebol and Red's parse dialect as a readable alternative to regexes, plus posts on macros, printf internals, and memory-allocator debugging.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 19 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Why Rebol, Red, and the Parse Dialect Are Cool (2013)6 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2014-02-25
- Where the Printf Rubber Meets the Road (2010)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2014-10-04
- Rebol vs. Lisp Macros3 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2016-04-21
- Machine Language for the Commodore 64 and 128 (2014)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-06-05
- /location-parameterized-assertions/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-02-29
What Hacker News says?
> I can't shake the feeling that Regexp could be written just as efficiently as a fluent interface with a more human friendly syntax. You can use SRL - Simple Regex Language ( https://simple-regex.com/ ) for making readable regex/matching rules. It is supported in C++, Java, C#, PHP, Javascript, and Python. Also, you can use the web version to generate equivalent regex if your language is one of the above. Here is a…
Comment linking /why-rebol-red-parse-cool/
on “Regexper – Regular expressions visualizer”Submitted Rebol vs. Lisp Macros as a story · 117 points
HN discussionThere was a Parse-inspired project for JavaScript, but I'm not sure to what extent it was developed. There was also a Parse implementation in Topaz[1] (which itself is implemented in JavaScript) but is as of now unfinished. It'd be difficult to implement as tightly in another language that doesn't have Rebol's (or a somewhat Lisp-like) free-form code-is-data/data-is-code[2] approach. Rebol and its Parse dialect shar…
Comment linking /why-rebol-red-parse-cool/
on “SRL – Simple Regex Language”Submitted .Trashes, .fseventsd, and .Spotlight-V100 as a story · 89 points
HN discussionBarely touch regexes these days because for last few years I've been using Rebol / Red parse more and more. Here's a translation of the first SRL example in the parse dialect: [ some [number | letter | symbol] "@" some [number | letter | "-" ] some ["." copy tld some [number | letter | "-" ]] if (parse tld [letter some letter]) ] And here's a full matching example: number: charset "0123456789" letter: charset [#"a"…
Comment linking /why-rebol-red-parse-cool/
on “SRL – Simple Regex Language”Submitted Where the Printf Rubber Meets the Road (2010) as a story · 80 points
HN discussion>> ...Only Perl 6 comes close to the ease of writing parsers with Lua+LPeg. I would argue that it doesn't get any easier than using Rebol/Red parse dialect - http://blog.hostilefork.com/why-rebol-red-parse-cool/
Comment linking /why-rebol-red-parse-cool/
on “Why Clojure? (2010)”Submitted Rebol vs. Lisp Macros as a story · 7 points
HN discussion> > If anything, it sounds too easy, making me think "what's the catch? > This is rude and uncalled for. I think she/he raise a fair point about how the Red language is advertised, and it's actually a rather friendly to assume that it's due to language barrier. Many posts about Red/Rebol are unequivocal praise with very few details or any acknowledgements of short-comings or limitations of the languages. Just to dig…
Comment linking /rebol-vs-python-performance/
on “Red Programming Language: Plans for 2019”Submitted Machine Language for the Commodore 64 and 128 (2014) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionRebol's parse dialect is basically easily readable regexes (actually even more, but that's not relevant here). For some examples see: http://blog.hostilefork.com/why-rebol-red-parse-cool/
Comment linking /why-rebol-red-parse-cool/
on “ECMAScript regular expressions are getting better (2017)”Submitted Stopping Exploitation from Being Profitable as a story · 2 points
HN discussionYou can write more verbose regex using Named Capture Buffers. Here is an example I posted on HN not long ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6895126 NB. Follow link to original post to compare against standard regex version. There are also some nice grammar parsers available in some languages which make this even easier. For examples of this see Perl6 Rules/Grammar, Perl5 Regexp::Grammars or (for something whi…
Comment linking /why-rebol-red-parse-cool/
on “Q – Execute SQL on text. Supports joins across files, RPM available”Submitted Why Rebol, Red, and the Parse Dialect Are Cool (2013) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI've steered more to composing grammars by using tools like Regexp::Grammars - https://metacpan.org/pod/Regexp::Grammars The real sweet spot I've found is parse in Rebol / Red - http://blog.hostilefork.com/why-rebol-red-parse-cool/ | http://www.rebol.com/docs/core23/rebolcore-15.html
Comment linking /why-rebol-red-parse-cool/
on “Tyre – Typed regular expressions”Submitted The Central Newbie Question about Rebol/Red as a story · 2 points
HN discussionNote that Ren-C (a fork of Rebol that is only tangentially related to Ren) uses `blank` or literal `_`. The language concept is a bit more fundamental than config files. Rebol (and Ren-C and cousin Red) is a fully homoiconic language that itself has tools for parsing and interpreting DSLs ('Dialects' to use the language's nomenclature) that use the same language rules. In essence you do indeed get the lexer for free…
Comment linking /why-rebol-red-parse-cool/
on “Ren: a lightweight data-exchange text format”Submitted Where the Printf Rubber Meets the Road (2010) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionHere's an article from the musl wiki that explains differences from glibc: http://wiki.musl-libc.org/wiki/Functional_differences_from_g... All the bugs discovered by musl, and how many are glibc-related: http://wiki.musl-libc.org/wiki/Bugs_found_by_musl If you want to know why someone would want to replace glibc, then I give you a challenge: figure out how glibc implements printf(3). Good luck. The answer is: http:/…
Comment linking /where-printf-rubber-meets-road/
on “How to compile C apps with musl and Clang”Submitted Computer Languages as Artistic Medium as a story · 1 points
HN discussionInstead of switching to the debug allocator, might it instead be possible to teach ASAN about the pool allocator? I think I did this at some point in the past for Valgrind. I don't know if it would be sufficient, but with ASAN it's at least possible to "poison" and un-poison memory manually with macros: http://blog.hostilefork.com/poison-memory-without-asan/
Comment linking /poison-memory-without-asan/
on “When a Memory Allocator Hides Security Bugs”Submitted Where the Printf() Rubber Meets the Road as a story · 1 points
HN discussion>> Rebol and Red are both like Lisp in being homoiconic With regards to this I do like Hostilefork's companion blog post regarding macros - http://blog.hostilefork.com/rebol-vs-lisp-macros/ (HN comments - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11587952 )
Comment linking /rebol-vs-lisp-macros/
on “Parsing – REBOL Users Guide”Submitted Machine Language for the Commodore 64 and 128 as a story · 1 points
HN discussionMore than a decade later, Rebol (and its newer offspring Red red-lang.org) are still in regular use on my team. A cool thing about Rebol's (and Red's) PEGs are that they can easily parse and process the diverse datatypes of its parent source. REBOL Parser in 10 Lines http://www.rebol.net/cookbook/recipes/0042.html And: http://blog.hostilefork.com/why-rebol-red-parse-cool/ "But even more impressively, it can work on…
Comment linking /why-rebol-red-parse-cool/
on “Parsing – REBOL Users Guide”Unfortunately no examples of Rebol's parse were given. Here are some links to fill the gap: http://www.rebol.net/wiki/Common_Parse_Patterns https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/REBOL_Programming/Language_Fea... http://blog.hostilefork.com/why-rebol-red-parse-cool/ http://rebol-land.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/rebols-answer-to-re... http://www.rebol.com/r3/docs/concepts/parsing-summary.html http://www.rebol.net/wiki/Parse_Project
Comment linking /why-rebol-red-parse-cool/
on “Alternatives to Regular Expressions”Oh, it gets much better. Here's printf being traced in detail: http://blog.hostilefork.com/where-printf-rubber-meets-road/ Seeing this, one realizes there is something fundamentally wrong with how their language or libraries work. ;) Personally, I think these things are perfect examples of where a language providing macros, DSL's, and/or generic interfaces can be much more readable. You could just describe the gramm…
Comment linking /where-printf-rubber-meets-road/
on “Doug McIlroy on Unix Taste (2014)”Another original idea for debugging with "codeplaces": http://blog.hostilefork.com/location-parameterized-assertion...
Comment linking /location-parameterized-assertions/
on “Error Context – a stack trace for data”Found it on /r/proglangdesign ;-) I'm a big fan of stack-based languages and I like a lot the name of your language. It reminds me this post too: http://blog.hostilefork.com/location-parameterized-assertion...
Comment linking /location-parameterized-assertions/
on “Postion Independent Source Code”...Swap your language prefs to say, arabic? ;) More seriously though, I think it depends what your background is. Maths works in prefix notation eg. f(g(x)) but I appreciate that you can hold the stack in your head easier with postfixLR. Many people who are used to lisp would probably prefer prefix notation. non-stack or array langs have a nice tradeoff that you can look at the code without having to keep a model in…
Comment linking /rebol-vs-lisp-macros/
on “Uiua: A minimal stack-based, array-based language”
