Best intro to dialects and parse?

Question

I'm new to Rebol, and am working with a small corporate-based group to evaluate it for use in some areas that time and again have proven themselves highly resistant to change and to concepts such as DSLs.

Can anyone suggest what they have found to be a good intro to dialecting via "parse"? I have been reading the available docs from the Rebol 3 site, as well as the programmer's guide by Auverlot and Wood, and that may be more than enough -- but if anyone has suggestions for other related material or examples, I'd be appreciative of the advice.

PS: I'm also new to stackoverflow, and so don't yet have the magic 20 points for chat...

Headwards

It sounds like you've located the best resources for learning about parse. There are some good examples of parse being used in Rebol for corporate-level stuff, like coginov.com (heavy parse users) and other companies. – Stevie

Thanks! One of my colleagues attended the recent ReCode, so I've been hearing a lot about Coginov; I'll have a look at their website. – Headwards

Answer 1

Some tutorials on parse:

• 9.3 Parse (REBOL's Answer to Regular Expressions)

• Computer Programming Tutorial, by Nick Antonaccio

• a parse tutorial sort of.

Dialecting from same guy:

• 9.21 Bindology, Dialects, Metaprogramming and Other Advanced Topics

• Followed by some examples that show a few examples

Graber

It's the same as the written but Nick walks you through it – Graber

I'll just point out that the "simple parse" (e.g. passing in strings or none) has fallen from favor in Rebol 3, as has the need to specify an /ALL refinement. My understanding is that the PARSE operation will now always assume /ALL and always require a block of parse rules. It's easy enough to implement the simpler parse with this yourself, but if that parametrization is to reappear as a convenience helper it would have a new name. – Perverse

You can also find good parse examples in REBOL itself, try "SOURCE LAYOUT". – Adama

Good point -- I'm beginning to learn just how many aspects of Rebol are dialects :) – Headwards

Everything is dialected. – Basie

Answer 2

If you search on Stack Overflow with the [parse][rebol] tags, you should have quite a few nice and simple examples, with lots of meaty explanations and comments about them.

Heaney

Thanks: tried it; lots of interesting hits. It probably should have occurred to me from the outset to search SO -- put it down to my SO newb status (sometimes the obvious is the last thing to cross one's mind ;-)) – Headwards