Rendering Difference For Bound/Unbound Code

Domains Console
1

With the new binding model tending to have things sparsely bound, it helps to know what is and isn't bound.

It seems to me it would be very useful (and educational) in rich consoles to make the rendering of code reflect the binding status.

image

So there you can see that a plain block will evaluate so the block itself is bound, while the contents are left unbound. A quoted block will be all unbound.

Even better would be if you could hover over the bound bits and see what they were bound to. It may be best if the coloring was very subtle by default (e.g. just bold black vs a dark gray) and then if you hovered, maybe it would colorize it... perhaps even making things bound the same match colors.

2 Likes
2

It may be of interest to know that rlang also uses colour to distinguish quosures with different bindings.

(And it additionally prints the memory location of their bound environments, but that wouldn’t work very well for Rebol, I think.)

3

I am thinking that at even in a normal console, it would be useful to say if something is bound or unbound at the tip.

You wouldn't have rich coloring options...and it doesn't tell you anything about the binding of contained items. But I think it would serve enough of a purpose to be worth it.

We could do:

>> '[add 1 1]
== [add 1 1]  ; unbound

>> [add 1 1]
== [add 1 1]  ; bound

But I think it would be preferable if the unbound state didn't display any decoration:

>> '[add 1 1]
== [add 1 1]

>> [add 1 1]
== [add 1 1]  ; bound

It's wasteful to not taking advantage of the ability to leave it blank. Also, "unbound" is a negated sense of a word (negated states intrinsically more awkward to process), and a longer/uglier word.

New policy enforcement of antiforms strips binding from them.

>> null: 10

>> var: $null
== null  ; bound

>> get var
== 10

>> antivar: anti var  ; forced through ANTIFORM_0 chokepoint, strips binding
== ~null~  ; anti

>> get unquasi meta antivar
** Error: null not bound

So this means we don't have to worry about printing ; anti bound because there are no bound antiforms.