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Asked: 2026-05-20T13:43:14+00:00

I’ve started looking into REBOL, just for fun, and as a fan of programming

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I’ve started looking into REBOL, just for fun, and as a fan of programming languages, I really like seeing new ideas and even just alternative syntaxes. REBOL is definitely full of these. One thing I noticed is the use of ‘/’ as the path operator which can be used similarly to the ‘.’ operator in most object-oriented programming languages. I have not programmed in REBOL extensively, just looked at some examples and read some documentation, but it isn’t clear to me why there’s no ambiguity with the ‘/’ operator.

x: 4
y: 2
result: x/y

In my example, this should be division, but it seems like it could just as easily be the path operator if x were an object or function refinement. How does REBOL handle the ambiguity? Is it just a matter of an overloaded operator and the type system so it doesn’t know until runtime? Or is it something I’m missing in the grammar and there really is a difference?

UPDATE Found a good piece of example code:

sp: to-integer (100 * 2 * length? buf) / d/3 / 1024 / 1024

It appears that arithmetic division requires whitespace, while the path operator requires no whitespace. Is that it?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    The code guide says:

    White-space is used in general for delimiting (for separating symbols).

    This is especially important because words may contain characters such as + and -.

    http://www.rebol.com/r3/docs/guide/code-syntax.html

    One acquired skill of being a REBOler is to get the hang of inserting whitespace in expressions where other languages usually do not require it 🙂

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