A proliferation of $#@^':~WORD~:s

Development Datatypes
2

To be sure, this is a strange medium to step into...and Ren-C has made it appear stranger on first look.

(But I think many things--like isotopes--are a logical consequence of wanting the medium to "actually work". Some others disagree, mostly because they appear not to care if it works or not.)

Having used the medium for quite a while, I'm far more concerned about the problems that would arise from having to distinguish META-GET-WORD!s from GET-META-WORD!s (or GET-WORD-META!s) than I am by the problems currently faced by some compositional desires.

It's probably the case that the problematic compositions show when a design is at the breaking point where another angle of thinking is needed, than be evidence that the one-sigil-limit rule should be lifted.

It's hard to give some kind of first-principles proof of why the chosen rules are "good". Probably not all of them are good. :frowning: But the choice to limit to one sigil is intentional, as an attempt to focus thinking along the particular strata of parts when solving problems. (So far, there are almost no isotopes of things that carry sigils...so maybe we could even commit to prohibiting quasiforms or antiforms of anything that has one, to rein things in slightly more.)

Really it's all a big balancing act. And I think the time for real judgment on where to draw the lines will be once the sloppy language pile actually has that "first functioning transistor" moment and demonstrates living up to its claimed potential. As evidenced by wanting to push things around with $ and @ and what they imply, I'm really not there yet when it comes to something as fundamental as binding...it's vaporware in my estimation until it isn't. But feeling closer.

"The test of the machine is the satisfaction it gives you. There isn't any other test. If the machine produces tranquility it's right. If it disturbs you it's wrong until either the machine or your mind is changed."

Note that in Ren-C, #ISSUE (probably going to be called #TOKEN) is an immutable stringlike type (no series position) that does not carry a binding. It's a unification of the CHAR! and ISSUE! types (a single-codepoint token is a character).

There have been some historical changes to this, where it was a string type in Rebol2 but a word type in R3-Alpha. Red has its own decisions, whatever they are.