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O'Reilly on the Virtues of Rexx
gaijincory writes "O'Reilly's ONLamp has written an interesting article on the history and virtues of Rexx, the first widely used scripting language concocted 25 years ago. According to the review, 'Rexx employs decimal rather than binary arithmetic' and 'You don't need to declare or predefine your variables. Rexx automatically allocates them when you first refer to them.'
I'd be interested to hear about any success (or failure) implementation stories."
>You don't need to declare or predefine your variables.
Isn't this a bad thing? You would never catch typos when using variables. I start using a variable named "myBigNumber" then the next day I mistakenly start using a "myBigNum" variable even though I mean the same thing.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
Is anyone else uncomfortable with case insensitive languages? That was one of the things I'd hoped REXX would address when it came out as a replacement for EXEC, I've always thought aside from the confusion factor of ignoring case (ever lose a file in Windows because of this?), not distinguishing case throws away an entire semantic of elegance for creating better and more maintainable code.
No, actually you misplacing files because the case wasn't what you expected on an old Windows 3.x system was the result of using badly ported case-sensitive tools in a case-insensitive environment. (btw: Windows has always been case-insensitive and case-preserving in the NT codebase)
Case sensitivity is, frankly, not only useless but flat out stupid and a vast step backward as it doesn't match human readable languages or other human experience thus breaking the paradigm of programming language as translator between human intent and hardware inflexibility. It leads to huge numbers of easily avoidable errors, increased maintenance time and cost and increased overall development time while providing no benefit. Sure, it makes life a little easier for lazy compiler writers and it's habit in people who've never bothered to learn any languages not derived from C but the point of a programming language is to make things easier for the human and not the compiler. Read some code in PL/I or ALGOL or LISP or Smalltalk or SNOBOL or, for that matter, REXX and you may expand your idea of what a language can be.
Other signs of C-blinders are thinking that three-part loop constructs are a good thing, that curly braces are actually either ergonomic or intuitive or that semicolons are how you end sentences;
I don't think Rexx had a lot to do with the failure of the Amiga or OS/2 in the marketplace. Curiously enough, both of them had their deeply loyal adherents, and perhaps REXX was one of the reasons.
I have to admit that as a general rule I perfer languages that don't force me to declare variables, especially for simple projects. Or perhaps I just get tired of hearing stilted, bureaucratic language like "best practices".
That being said, what's wrong with decimal arithmatic? It has the major advantage of eliminating the tiresome rounding errors that make doing financial calculations in (say) Perl so annoying.
I thought the examples showed a very interesting way of thinking. I probably won't learn or convert to REXX but I can see that it's a very forgiving environment, and I think that makes life more pleasant overall, especially for beginneers. I can see why it's popular in cultures where C and Perl didn't start with overwhelming advantages.
D