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O'Reilly on the Virtues of Rexx

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the langauges-that-time-forgot dept.

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."

1 of 330 comments (clear)

  1. some issues.... by yagu · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Okay, I'm probably dating myself here (illegal in Nebraska, btw), but I remember REXX when it emerged as a replacement for EXEC which I had coded extensively in (written entire app systems) on IBM mainframes. There were a lot of benefits to REXX back then, notably it cleaned up and made transparent a lot of garbage and system management chores required to write clean EXEC code (e.g., strings tokenized at 8 chars, awkward variable interpolation)... I used REXX for a while on the mainframe and can't remember why I abandoned it.

    Fast forward 2 or 3 hundred years, and I found myself dropped into a Unix universe, and quickly self taught myself the ins and outs of shell. Haven't looked back since. Now, I'm looking back and am intrigued... REXX really does have some interesting features. And, since I have a little free time on my hands, maybe I'll re-visit REXX, but from userland out there, any feedback would be useful:

    • Are there any performance issues with REXX, especially for large implementations?
    • How much can you do self-contained in REXX today? One of the things I like about a language like perl is it really abstracts a lot of utilities otherwise passed outside of perl's purview, shielding coders from having to write platform specific snippets for portability. From the examples it looks like REXX takes the other philosophy and encourages dropping out momentarily to execute a native system command or utility.
    • Like perl, are there ways to be strict with REXX (it wasn't totally apparent from the article)?
    • Is REXX really that popular out there? The article seems to think REXX is one of the most popular languages, but other than me I can't name a single other programmer I've known who writes/has written REXX applications. Maybe this is only a European seed for now (in the article).
    • 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.