The simple things matter the most

[hostilefork]

@iArnold

>> to block! txt
== [{What becomes of a string when turned into a [] value?}]

So clearly not what was intended!

If you have strong feelings about what the natural intent of TO is, that's something that needs to be pinned down, and it's getting closer I think:

Hacking away on the TO and MAKE Matrix

I'm reminded of another thing I thought about which might help distinguish a TO from a MAKE. That could be that you are assured that TO won't evaluate anything you pass in. So if you said x: does [print "hi" 10] | to text! [x + 20], whatever did happen, it would not print out "hi" and come back as the text string "30". That would limit what to text! of a BLOCK! would be allowed to do, e.g. to things like MOLD or FORM (but not "REMOLD" <gack!> or "REFORM" <gaaack!>) As far as I know, there ar…

"Finding the Invariant" - Case Study: TO

When I gave this example, I was contrasting TEXT! and CHAR! conversions TO INTEGER!. I should have pointed out that ISSUE! is a more obvious dissonance: rebol2>> to integer! #1 == 1 rebol2>> to integer! #"1" == 49 That just looks wrong as-is. But when #1 and #"1" are synonyms as immutable "issuechar!"/TOKEN! (as by all appearances they should be), there can't be a distinction. It may be that some other operator like as integer! fits into getting the codepoint. But I mention codepoint of a…