Deprecate the CONTEXT function

[Siskin-Bot]

Submitted by: BrianH

Rebol is a language with context-sensitive semantics - we call it "dialects". When explaining Rebol's semantics to people with any kind of CS background or who somehow otherwise know what "context-sensitive" means, that is the term that works best for getting the ideas across, to explain what the term "dialect" means.

This fails completely when we start using the term "context" to refer to an object, because it's not a term that anyone else uses for this, and it's hard to explain why we're using it. Normally, we'd just prefer to use other terms for this, but it's difficult when we have a function named CONTEXT that (inexplicably) just generates an object. Going forward, we'll be better off calling the function OBJECT (#2118) and never mentioning CONTEXT again.

With #2118, this is just a matter of adding a value alias for the new OBJECT named CONTEXT, and putting in a comment saying it's deprecated. That will give us time to get rid of references to the CONTEXT function.

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^{Imported from: CureCode [ Version: r3 master Type: Wish Platform: All Category: Mezzanine Reproduce: Always Fixed-in:none ]
Imported from: metaeducation#2123}

Comments:

Rebolbot commented on Mar 7, 2014:

Submitted by: BrianH

Finalizing the name of #2119 and refining #2118 makes it possible to deprecate CONTEXT more slowly. Severity adjusted accordingly.

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Rebolbot commented on Mar 7, 2014:

Submitted by: Ladislav

I adjusted severity to major since it would require changes and revisions of existing code.

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Rebolbot commented on Mar 7, 2014:

Submitted by: BrianH

OK, though "require changes and revisions of existing code" is not a blocker here. This is a #666 issue.

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Rebolbot mentioned this issue on Jan 22, 2016:
[Epic] Backwards-incompatible API changes, for the greater good

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Rebolbot added Type.wish and Status.important on Jan 12, 2016

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