Rebol ( ; historically REBOL) is a cross-platform which is also the most notable property of the language according to its designer Carl Sassenrath:

Douglas Crockford, known for his involvement in the development of JavaScript, has described Rebol as "a more modern language, but with some very similar ideas to Lisp, in that it's all built upon a representation of data which is then executable as programs" and as one of JSON's influences. the Rebol version 3 interpreter was released under the Apache 2.0 license on December 12, 2012. Older versions are only available in binary form, and no source release for them is planned.

Rebol has been used to program Internet applications (both client- and server-side), database applications, utilities, and multimedia applications. In subsequent writing, Sassenrath adopted the convention of writing the language name as Rebol.

History

First released in 1997, Rebol was designed over a 20-year period by Carl Sassenrath, the architect and primary developer of AmigaOS, based on his study of denotational semantics and using concepts from the programming languages Lisp, Forth, Logo, and Self.

  1. REBOL Technologies was founded in 1998.
  2. REBOL 2, the interpreter, which became the core of extended interpreter editions, was first released in 1999.
  3. REBOL/Command, which added strong encryption and ODBC access, was released in September 2000.
  4. REBOL/View was released in April 2001, adding graphical abilities on the core language.
  5. REBOL/IOS, an extensible collaboration environment built with REBOL was released in August 2001.
  6. REBOL/SDK, providing a choice of kernels to bind against, as well as a preprocessor, was released in December 2002.
  7. Rebol 3 [R3], the newest version of the interpreter, had alpha versions released by REBOL Technologies since January 2008. Since its release as an Apache 2 project in December 2012, it is being developed by the Rebol community.

Design

Ease of use

One of the Rebol design principles is "to do simple things in simple ways". In the visual interface dialect (VID), <code>return</code> is a keyword causing the layout engine to simulate a carriage return, moving the "rendering pen" down to the beginning of the next line.

  • Boron is an interpreted, homoiconic language inspired by and similar to Rebol, which is meant for embedding domain specific languages. It is implemented as a C library licensed under the terms of the LGPLv3.
  • The Red programming language was directly inspired by Rebol, yet the implementation choices of Red were geared specifically to overcoming its perceived limitations.

See also

  • Domain-specific language
  • Language-oriented programming

References

Further reading

  • A REBOL tutorial
  • Rebol 3 Tutorial
  • Rebol 3 (Oldes' fork) sources