REBOL Design Objectives for Computer Scientists

Here's a quick summary of the REBOL Language design objectives for those of you who are computer scientists. Everyone else can skip to the next section.

• Very clean denotational semantics.
• Very clean syntax, no keywords, minimal punctuation.
• Symbolic programming methods.
• Functional language techniques.
• Context dependent grammars: dialects, domain specific languages.
• Meta-circular (it's its own meta language)
• Lexically rich: many built-in types and representations.
• Prototypical objects, not classes.
• Consistent polymorphic datatype functions.
• Untyped, multi-typed, and strongly typed variables.
• Definitional binding and rebinding.
• First class datatypes.
• Wide range of standard built-in functions (no import needed).
• Embedded documentation.
• Efficient execution and memory usage.
• Extremely small footprint.

For more details, see docs/expert-intro.html