REBOL Bots
By Carl Sassenrath
Over the past two decades, my search for the perfect scripting language led me to work with companies such as HP, Amiga, and Apple. In that time, I investigated more than 50 different languages, from Ada to C, from Pascal to Lisp. I wanted a language that was very simple and readable with almost no syntax, yet very flexible with a wide degree of expressive freedom. It needed to allow a script to run on a great number of platforms without modification, have an extensive set of built-in data types that felt natural to humans, and smoothly support all of the standard network protocols, such as HTTP, FTP, POP, SMTP, NNTP, time, finger, whois, and more. And finally, so that I could use it everywhere, I wanted the entire package to be small (less than 200KB) with no installation hassle -- just copy it and run. More than anything else, I wanted a language that was friendly, usable, and highly productive.
In the mid 1980s, I stumbled across a mathematics called denotational semantics, which provided great insights into the structure and meaning of language. From there I developed the basic principles of my design and merged many of the best concepts from the languages I encountered along the way.
The result of this quest became the Relative Expression-Based Object Language (REBOL, pronounced REB-el), which was released free of charge late last year. I call REBOL a messaging language, because it's intended to be used in the same way as English: for communications, not just algorithms. It works equally well for expressing data as well as code. This aspect is its greatest strength; it's meant to offer a better approach to the exchange and interpretation of information among people, computers, and application software.<>
