Red is short for Red[uced] REBOL, and that's why Red users proudly call themselves reducers. This points to two things:
- Red builds upon REBOL, a language that gained some fame around the millennium and was built by Carl Sassenrath. In fact, Red is syntactically and semantically a 95% clone of REBOL, but tries to improve and enhance it where possible. This also means REBOL scripts can be easily converted to Red.
- Red (like REBOL) wants to reduce today's code complexity—it aims to have compact runtime environments and dependencies (around 1 MB), instead of the hundreds of MB of the Java or .NET platform.
