De-Verbification: NOUN OF X vs. NOUN X ?

Jun-2022: Post moved here from the thread remarking on Kaj's Meta Project

I looked to see if there were any updates on Kaj's Meta project, and it looks like he is kind of focusing on porting existing Atari 2600 demos written in assembly to the language.

There the usual debate on the Atari forum of people talking about why languages succeed or not, asking and trying to get at why anyone would care about Rebol, expressing skepticism that Kaj will strike gold...but he says it's successful even if he just uses it and it gives him a "competitive edge".

If you're interested you can read the threads:

One thing I noticed is that he has chosen to go with FIRST-OF instead of just FIRST. I've questioned this before, because things like NEXT and FIRST are useful variable names. In Ren-C there would be presumably no hyphen, so you could write:

first: first of block

Similar to how you can today say:

type: type of block

This is because OF quotes its left argument, with the idea that this is learnable.

You could of course still say:

first: specialize :of [property: 'first]

Which is actually how it works today.

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