Fundamental distinguishing features of Rebol

[hostilefork]

@bradrn

So that’s gotten me thinking: what are the basic concepts of Rebol as a programming paradigm, which distinguish it from all others?

I think an important point I hadn't articulated before is this:

Trust the User's Judgment... *When You Can*

When writing about whether we should have SET-WORD! for initializing locals in function specs, I talked about whether to enforce the right hand side of the SET-WORD! being a GROUP! for safety: I realized this kind of dove to the heart of Rebol philosophy: If you need to evaluate an expression multiple times, it has to be in an array. But if you're doing an evaluation just once, trust the user to formulate the expression and use an array if they deem it necessary. Most people encounter this …