Sometimes deep changes take a huge amount of code. Sometimes they take a lot of detailed explanation and consideration, leading to long discussions and people taking sides. Rarely does an important syntactic change to a language happen quickly, with universal agreement, simple implementation, and tools to help update scripts in the wild. Today is one of those rare days.
Admittedly, this idea has been discussed for a long time. It would surface, people nodded their virtual heads, and it would submerge again. Today it's ready to deploy. Not only that, but Rebol3 is making the same change, so the two languages will still be compatible in this regard.
What is the change?
It's easy to describe. Today, map! values use this syntax: #(...) and construction syntax (sometimes called serialized form or loadable form) looks like this: #[...]. Going forward, those syntactic forms will be swapped. Why? The answer is easy. In Redbol langs, blocks do not evaluate by default, you have to do or reduce them. Parens, on the other hand, do evaluate by default. Today, maps use paren-like syntax, but they do not evaluate, while construction syntax uses block-like syntax, but does evaluate. This is a carryover from Rebol, so the major concession here is that Red and Rebol3 will no longer be compatible with Rebol2's construction syntax.
If you've never heard of construction syntax, there's a nice explanation of it here. Red only supports a few values via construction syntax today, all datatype literals, true, false, none, and unset; but eventually it will support much more. If you look at the help for mold, you'll see that /all is TBD (very partially implemented for now), and that's how you create loadable, serialized, data that can safely and easily contain any value (like redbin but readable by humans). It helps avoid cases where none or true/false may load as words. This is also why construct evaluates those specific words (including also on/off/yes/no), but not others. When loading untrusted data, we have to strike a balance between ease of use and safety.
What do I have to do?
Not much. There are two tools available, which will convert your scripts automatically. The first is small and simple, showing just how powerful Red is, and leveraging its lexer instrumentation. You can find it here (once merged, that branch may go away and the tool will be in the main branch). The second is a more advanced and standalone tool written by @hiiamboris. You can find that here.
For the simple script it's necessary that you run it under a current version of Red's lexer. Once the change is in place, running it under the new lexer will make the exact opposite change. Of course, you can compile it into a standalone EXE, or use Boris' app, which is already available.
To run the simple script from a Red console, you can just:
do https://raw.githubusercontent.com/red/red/master/utils/migration/map-conv.red
then you can use help map-conv to see all the available options. By default it runs in preview mode, making no changes, and showing you all the instances it found, which will be changed if you use the /save refinement. A copy of each changed file is created with a .saved extension in the same folder. If you don't want them, you can use the /no-copy refinement.
A word of warning, if you run the conversion tools a second time on the same files, they will convert the data back, because they can't know what you're thinking. On the bright side, this is an effective "undo" feature. Still, it's wise to back up your data before running any tools against them.
Thanks to the power of Red, and these tools, there are already PRs pending for updates to docs and community scripts. But the other thing you can do to help is to let us know when you find things that need to be updated for this change, and especially if you run into any issues when converting your own code.
Conclusion
We know changes like this can be hard, but better now than when there is even more code in the wild that would be affected. If we had been any other language, this long-view improvement might not have happened. Only because Red (and Redbol langs in general) can consume their own code as data and have powerful parse and lexing features, was this change so easy and safe. It's still a code-porting process, and if you run multiple versions of Red you may need to maintain separate versions for a while. The other hard part is retraining your hands and eyes to the new syntax.
Happy Reducing!
Great Work!
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