> I have been looking into REBOL (http://www.rebol.com/) lately
> 
> - Extremely small footprint (200k) and easy installation
> - It's been ported to practically every major (and even minor) OS (over 43
> as of today)
> - Integrated networking API that makes programming most types of internet
> apps very easy.
> - code writing is extremely compact

I've also looked a bit at REBOL. Here are some interesting features
(positive, negative and neutral) that I have noted.

* Comparing it with other languages, it looks a bit like infix LISP. Code
  and data use similar formats which makes it easy to manipulate code.

* There is no operator precedence, operation proceeds strictly from left
  to right, so 3 + 4 * 2 and 4 * 2 + 3 give different results. This is
  kind of tricky.

* It comes with a built-in GUI that works out of the box and looks very
  nice (unlike Squeak).

* It is not free. There are public and commercial versions of the interpreter
  with different features.

* Some preferences are stored "language wide", for example the user's
  e-mail adress and proxy settings. This makes it very simple for programs
  to send mail or fetch web pages. In Ruby, every program would have to
  ask the user for his mail address and proxy settings.

* Quite a lot of data types are recognized by the parser. For example, a
  mail address can be written directly as niklas / kagi.com.

* It does not use regexps for pattern matching, instead it uses a parser
  (not sure what kind). I found it to be cumbersome when you want to do
  simple matches, but it is probably more powerful for complex matches.

* This parser can be used to extend the language and this is encouraged.
  They envision a lot of domain-specific REBOL variants. (I'm not so sure
  that is such a good idea.)

* There is no mention on how to interface the langauge with third-party
  C modules in the web documentation.

* The "free" REBOL interpreters I downloaded were time limited which
  was really irritating. After a while they stopped working and told me
  to download a new version. I couldn't continue to run my scripts, I had
  to download the new version.

I never became real comfortable with REBOL. Simple one-liners were easy
to do, but when I aimed for something more complex I found myself spending
a lot of time with the manuals. Ruby is much closer to how I think.

// Niklas