Exercism Red Track

Exercises and a course in Red.

Tooling:

• Test Runner
• Analyzer (not ready)
• Representer (not ready)

Contributing

Please, see the official contributing guide’s Building Tracks section. This track is already published, but there are many things to improve:

• We want to complete basic concepts.
• You also can always add a new practice exercise.
• Walk through the track, proofread any docs, report problems, or just give us any suggestions and thoughts you have on your mind.

There is also some interesting general info about Exercism, but remember it’s a legacy documentation and can be outdated and official docs always take precedence:

• Overview of Exercism
• The Goal of Exercism
• The scope of a track

Exercise ideas

Generally, practice exercises are best taken from Exercism’s problem-specifications repository, so the experience is similar for students in every language track. But in case you need some fresh ideas, here are some links with script examples you can check for inspiration, especially in topics specific to Red:

• http://www.mycode4fun.co.uk/red-beginners-reference-guide
• http://redprogramming.com/Short%20Red%20Code%20Examples.html#section-2
• https://github.com/red/red/wiki/%5BLINKS%5D-Scripts-collection

Scripts in Rebol (it’s very similar to Red)

• http://www.rebol.org/script-index.r
• http://reb4.me/r/
• http://www.rebol.com/oneliners.html

Practice exercises

First, read official documentation for background.

Now, here’s how we do this in the Red track:

1. Create an issue to let everybody know which exercises are being worked on,
2. Clone this repo,
3. Run our exercise generator; it will create all necessary files for the exercise:

   $ red _tools/generate-practice-exercise.red <exercise-slug>

4. In exercises/practice/<exercise-slug>/<exercise-slug>-test.red make a change like this, to test your example solution:

   ; test-init/limit %exercise-slug.red 1
   test-init/limit %.meta/example.red 1

5. Solve the exercise example, by editing exercises/practice/<exercise-slug>/.meta/example.red,
6. Run the tests. You’ll need to change the second argument of the test-init function from 1 to how many tests you want to run in <exercise-slug>-test.red.

   $ cd exercises/practice/<exercise-slug>
   $ red <exercise-slug>-test.red

7. Once your solution passes all the tests, remember to revert the changes made ↑ at point 4 in the test-init line: uncomment solution file, comment example file and change limit to 1 (second argument).
8. Change the exercise’s difficulty in track’s config,json. If you want, add practices and prerequisites concepts. Copy the exercise’s config to the proper position, so that all exercises are sorted from easiest to toughest.
9. Make a commit to a fresh branch and make a Pull Request.

Concepts

Useful for concepts and concept exercises

• http://helpin.red/

Concepts are being developed in a separate branch. More info is in GitHub task: https://github.com/exercism/red/issues/37 . There is no common source or list for concepts. Existing ones were created simply from looking at the practice exercises’ example solutions and deducing what’s needed to create and understand them.

There is a tool that counts and prints exercises unlocked by each concept, and exercises that practice the concept:

_tools/concepts-practice.red

Contact

Besides creating issues and commenting in this repository, you are welcome to post on Red’s “training” Gitter channel.