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Rexx for Everyone
An anonymous reader writes "It's easy to get lost in the world of 'little languages' -- quite a few have been written to scratch some itch of a company, individual, or project. Rexx is one of these languages, with a long history of use on IBM operating systems, and good current implementations for Linux and other Free Software operating systems. Rexx occupies a useful ecological niche between the relative crudeness of shell scripting and the cumbersome formality of full systems languages. Many Linux programmers and systems administrators would benefit from adding a Rexx implementation to their collection of go-to tools."
And very nice it was too. The key reason it took off were that application developers decided to support it even before AmigaOS 2.04 as a defacto standard for scripting and remote control. Most substantial applications - and quite a few minor ones - came with an "AREXX port" which you could use to send commands to the app to get it to do things.
This functionality seems to be sadly lacking these days in OSS or in a cross-vendor environment. You get the occasional application with a self-contained Python subsystem or something, and Microsoft supports VBA across their own applications, but it's not as fluid.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Where it really shined, though, was in its ability to control other running applications. Most decent Amiga programs had an "AREXX port", which was basically an API that you could connect to while the program was running. You could write a script so that whenever your newsreader encountered a URL on a trusted website, then it would execute an AREXX script that would queue a request on your web browser to visit that page. Or, maybe you wanted your MP3 player to tell your IRC client to tell the whole channel that you were playing a new CD.
By itself, AREXX was pretty lame. As a global scripting language that could tie abitrary applications together, it was wonderful.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
"...bash, perl, and tcl/tk..." Hey don't forget ruby! =)
Chaos is Divine *
> don't forget ruby! =)
Right on! Read more about Ruby here, and check out lots of projects using Ruby here - games, sysadmin utilities, wrappers for WxWindows and ImageMagick, and so forth. Good stuff!
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OREXX - Object rexx - is the answer to your complaint. Perl is nice, but rexx is in lots of places... The kids who laugh at rexx wouldn't know which end of a 370/168 to plug in... but it uses the same script language as the AS400. Rexx.