Why doesn't Rebol new-line? treat the newline keyword and the newline character similarly?

Question

I would think that the following Rebol 3 code:

x: [newline 1 2]
y: [
1 2]

print x
print new-line? x
print y
print new-line? y

should output:

<empty line>
1 2
true
<empty line>
1 2
true

but what is output is:

<empty line>
1 2
false
1 2
true

Both blocks, when reduced, should yield a newline character followed by '1' and '2' and so, IMO, should print identically. Less clear is whether new-line? on the two blocks should also give the same result since the newline keyword should be equivalent to the literal newline for this kind of test.

Answer 1

The flag which is checked by new-line? and set by new-line is used only by LOAD and MOLD. For all other semantic purposes in the program, it might as well not be there.

Therefore your x and y are completely different. Note that:

x: [newline 1 2]
y: [
1 2]

3 = length? x
2 = length? y

It's a quirk of Rebol that it singles out this one bit of whitespace information to stow in a hidden place. But arguably the choice to break a line represents something that is often significant in source, that if you reflect it back out into text you'd like to preserve more than the rest of the whitespace.