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Rexx for Everyone

Posted by michael on from the wrecks dept.

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."

3 of 61 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Not to mention... by Just+Some+Guy · · Score: 4, Interesting
    AREXX absolutely ruled. I once wrote a script to pull transfer completion status from a graphical FTP program, convert it to a pair of (x,y) coordinates a proportional distance along a line from (0,0) to (maxX,maxY), and pass that to a graphics program as the endpoint of a photo-realistic lightning bolt. As my transfer moved along, the lightning grew closer to the ground.

    Useless? Sure, but it looked a lot cooler than your average progress bar, and I could poke my head into the room to see at a glance how far along I was on my hour-long 2MB download from Aminet (via a 28.8 modem).

    --
    Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
  2. REXX isn't as much fun as Perl by doug · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I owe a lot to REXX. I used to love REXX. Back when I was a co-op at IBM I spent two years doing nothing but REXX on VM/CMS (note to youngsters: it was an OS for the 370 family). It paid for my car and a trip to Europe. But more importantly it got me used to scripting languages. After learning REXX, it was a small step to Perl (version 4.036). Since I learned Perl, I've never looked back at REXX. I'd be amazed if REXX hadn't evolved once it got off of mainframes, but I really doubt if it can do anything that Perl can't. They are both in the same nitch, but Perl has one thing that REXX doesn't: Perl is more fun. When everything else is said and done, enjoying your time at work is a huge advantage.

    Life is too short to waste on REXX. Stick to Perl have fun.

    - doug

  3. It's CobolScript for Unix!!! by Rob+Riggs · · Score: 4, Interesting
    From the article:
    #!/usr/bin/rexx
    ADDRESS SYSTEM ls WITH OUTPUT FIFO '' ERROR NORMAL
    DO i=1 WHILE queued() \= 0
    PARSE PULL line; SAY i || ") " || line; END

    Yeah, I can see right away why I would want to write programs in this language. No object model. No regular expressions. Cobol-like syntax. This is more like BASIC (and not even the Visual variety) than Perl or Awk.

    I know it may come off as such, but this really isn't meant as flamebait. I just really don't get why people would want to write new code in such a dreadful language.

    (To be fair, I think the same of PL/SQL coders; but at least they have a good reason -- "Larry made me do it.")

    --
    the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause