REBOL for COBOL programmers

Windows 10 Atronix REBOL 3 installing and running

March 10, 2022

This is a short report on downloading and installing the REBOL3
version maintained by Atronix Engineering. At some point, they
took over maintenance of the REBOL 3 branch and used it in their
production system. As of March 2022, word on the street is that
they stopped using REBOL3, but their website indicates that they
still maintain it, although it is not clear if it is being
improved if they have stopped using it.

Contents:

1. Target audience and references

The target audience is anyone who wants to try a version of REBOL3. The REBOL3 on the rebol.com site seems to be a core version only. Various organizations seem to have taken what source code was available and made their own versions of REBOL3. Anyone who wants to try REBL3 will have to seek out these versions and try them.

This test was done on a computer running 64-bit Windows 10. At the time this document was written, all we had done was to download REBOL3 and run a test script to make sure it worked.

2. Download REBOL3 and get it running

Go to the Atronix download page:

https://www.atronixengineering.com/downloads

Scroll down to the link called "Windows (64-bit) and right-click it. On the menu the pops up, select "Save link as." At this point the interpreter might go to your downloads folder, or you might get a security warning that the item is a risk, and the only obvious option is to delete it. Look for a little caret symbol on the message box and see if you can find an option to "keep" the file. You are trying to download a file called atronix-rebol-windows-64bit.exe.

When you have downloaded it, try to run it with a double-click. You probably will get a warning that you should not run it. Look for some option to run it anyway, and select that option. If you are successful you will get a REBOL command prompt.

At this point, you could copy the downloaded file to some folder where you plan to keep it for the long term. I have a folder on the C drive, called REBOL3, where I put it and plan to store any scripts I write.

3. Write a test script and run it

Write a very simple script. Here is an idea:

REBOL [
    Title: "R3 Hello World test"
]
LOAD-GUI
alert "Hello World"

Save the script. It seems that you could save it anywhere, but for now, make things easy and strore it with the interpreter. As for a name, It seems you can do what you want. A noted REBOL programmer named Nick Antonaccio has been creating scripts named with the dot-r3 extension, so that might be a good place to start. Alternatively, dot-reb has been suggested. There might not be any standard.

Now you want to run the script. You can experiment with other ways later, but initially, simple is best. Try to double-click the test script. You should get a message that Windows does not know what to do, and Windows will suggest searching the internet. Try to find the other option to locate that appropriate program locally on your computer. Browse to the interpreter you downloaded and select that as the program to run dot-r3 scripts. The test script should run and display a simple alert box. It appears that from this point you can run dot-r3 scripts by double-clicking them.

4. Find some documentation

The Atronix web site has a link to a wiki, but I was not able to access it. Some error message about my computer time being incorrectly set, which it was not as far as I could tell.

Nick Antonaccio has written documentation about using a different version REBOL3. That is here:

https://learnrebol.com/rebol3_book.html

It appears that the above web page has been put into a PDF and can be found here:

https://u1lib.org/book/3713889/b17c9d