![Programming Programming](http://a.fsdn.com/sd/topics/programming_64.png)
![IBM IBM](http://a.fsdn.com/sd/topics/ibm_64.png)
![IT IT](http://a.fsdn.com/sd/topics/it_64.png)
![Technology Technology](http://a.fsdn.com/sd/topics/technology_64.png)
Rexx Is Still Strong After 25 years 288
therexxman writes "March marks the 25th anniversary of the Rexx programming language, and to celebrate the Rexx Language Association is hosting the 15th Annual Rexx Symposium at the IBM Research Labs in Boeblingen, Germany, from May 2 to 6, 2004.
Full details of the Symposium can be found in the 2004 Rexx Symposium Announcement.
Many of the world's 'Rexxperts' will be in attendance including Rexx's founder, Decimal Arithmetic guru, and IBM Fellow, Mike Cowlishaw."
wait a minute (Score:5, Funny)
Re:wait a minute (Score:5, Funny)
No, THAT was Fortran.
Re:wait a minute (Score:2, Funny)
Or maybe it just concatenates my CLIST dataset into my SYSPROC DD.
Anyway, its old. And yes, I do work for the government. REXX is bleeding edge technology here, baby!
Rexx is good... (Score:4, Funny)
Rexx IS going strong (Score:3, Funny)
Rexx going strong [ndtilda.co.uk].
Re:Rexx IS going strong (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Rexx IS going strong (Score:2, Interesting)
Go Rexx!! a great language for writing code.
in other news (Score:5, Funny)
Best of Primitive Computing (Score:4, Funny)
Punch cards are all good and fine.
But if you want real power in a computing machine, what you need is something like Stonehenge, which has the advantage of
-kgj
Re:Best of Primitive Computing (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Best of Primitive Computing (Score:5, Funny)
Never been to England? More like 90% :-)
And if you want portability... (Score:2)
Call me ignorant, but... (Score:3, Interesting)
This FAQ is for REXX/MVS, that is, REXX for IBM mainframes (MVS, OS/390 and VM).
Okay... but is this language at the forefront of modern computing, or even close to it? That's not a cynical inquiry; I'd literally never heard of this language before and I'm curious to know whether it's making some kind of progressive, hidden impact that was just totally unknown to me.
Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?
Re:Call me ignorant, but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Call me ignorant, but... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Call me ignorant, but... (Score:3, Interesting)
The programs we ran on the the IBM 370-type mainframes generally had their user interfaces written in REXX, and they were easy to write and easy to change.
REXX became the scripting language of choice for OS/2, which beats to hell the pitiable DOS batch file language, but other scripting languages have far surpassed it now, yet pl
Correct me if I'm wrong, but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Correct me if I'm wrong, but... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Call me ignorant, but... (Score:2)
Seriously, anybody who hasn't worked with REXX has no clue what a scripting language could be or just how badly the industry was crippled b
Re:Call me ignorant, but... (Score:5, Informative)
For those that are wondering: REXX was created to be the universal command language for IBM mainframes. It is a replacement for the earlier command languages (EXEC? on VM and CLIST on MVS).
Then IBM ported it to OS/2, and from there it branched off. You can now find REXX for practically any platform. I have at least 5 different versions running on my Windows machine. (See Regina REXX on sourceforge, for example.)
REXX's main features include:
But the real key to REXX is it is designed so it can easily interface with multiple environments. For example, one REXX exec in z/OS can send commands and interact with MVS, TSO, ISPF, the ISPF Editor (as an Edit macro), and others.
The use of REXX on the mainframe is expanding. No mainframe product would think of writing their own command language; they just use REXX. And the more products you can interface with, the more useful it becomes.
Yes, I know there are Unix and other scripting languages that do the same types of things. But REXX is the standard for z/OS.
Re:Call me ignorant, but... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Call me ignorant, but... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Call me ignorant, but... (Score:2, Insightful)
You had me until this statement. I have taught myself both Perl and REXX and I love them both but I would not say Perl is harder to understand then REXX. Perl has grown over the years to be much larger language with many more features then REXX and perhaps harder to get your arms around because of the extent of Perl.
Re:Call me ignorant, but... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Call me ignorant, but... (Score:2)
Mindfucked!!!
Remember aRexx? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Remember aRexx? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Remember aRexx? (Score:3, Interesting)
KDE does have DCOP which lets you add script functionality to your apps as well as link separate apps together. It's just not as well utilised as it should be (from a users perspective).
Re:Remember aRexx? (Score:2)
Re:Remember aRexx? (Score:2, Insightful)
Order management, full accounting, catalog creation, quotes, etc...
I loved arexx.
Re:Remember aRexx? (Score:3, Informative)
aRexx was great, but todays mainframe Rexx is even better. Socket support, great parsing/string manip. abilities, great conversion utilites (ASCII TO EBICDIC AND BACK!)
Sure is! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Sure is! (Score:2)
Then I submit that you've not done a very extensive search. The top link of a google search should be to the IBM/Rexx homepage.
Cheers, Gene
Re:Sure is! (Score:2)
From what I hear REXX is still very popular in the IBM mainframe enviroment. UI used it on the Amiga many years ago and even wrote a binding for it. It was a standard part of OS/2 as well.
You might be surpised to see it becoming more important on Linux in the near future. IBM is pushing Linux to it's mainframe users. REXX could become an important part of Linux on servers. As to it being old. I doubt that it is older than c.
What wil
Fortran Called... (Score:3, Funny)
say "Counting..."
do i = 1 to 10
say "Number" i
end
Yuck!
Re:Fortran Called... (Score:3, Informative)
I do alot of Rexx stuff on Mainframes, and I far prefer Rexx to the C based stuff like Perl. Ive pottered with Rexx on Linux, and its far easier to use than bash, you can always use 'address SH' if you want to use the power of a shell command. I also had a play with NetRexx, but gave up when it became obvious that Java itself had seriou
Rexx was great... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Rexx was great... (Score:3, Interesting)
At CountryWide Home Loans there's a group that's responsible for transfering loan data between the branches and the AS400's. They use a commercial tool that has the option of firing off a program or script at a givien time, kinda like a weak cron.
So, long before I got there, someone said, "Hey, since we're running this on OS/2 we can use REXX for the new service management is asking
Re:Rexx was great... (Score:2)
Unfortunately, I've forggen practically everything I ever learned about it.
go go rqqrtnb! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:go go rqqrtnb! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:go go rqqrtnb! (Score:2)
Sorry this guy ripped off your stuff, man.
Well.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Well.. (Score:4, Insightful)
All depends how you look at it.
Its the de-facto scripting language on the paltform that hosts two thirds of the fortune 500s data.
Re:Well.. (Score:2)
I'm suddenly scared by the prospect that 2/3 of the Fortune 500 is run by Amiga 500's...
Ahh... Memories (Score:2)
Sigh... I miss my Amiga.
Rexx and Kedit (Score:5, Interesting)
I send mansfield an e-mail every so often requesting a Linux version or ask to open source the code but they just ignore me. Kedit would be a good replacement for vi on linux.
Any other Kedit fans out there? BTW not to be confused with the KDE based editor by the same name.
Re:Rexx and Kedit (Score:5, Informative)
You are looking for The Hessling Editor [sourceforge.net].
Re:Rexx and Kedit (Score:2)
It is easy enough to understand why Mansfield does not open source it: occasionally someone will still send them a check.
Re:Rexx and Kedit (Score:2, Interesting)
Once upon a time, a PC guru came to our department to tell us we needed to use a PC editor to edit our mainframe source, as well as a PC front-end to our debugger, because that was the only way we could get an IDE. We showed him our complete compile-debug-edit environment based on the mainframe editor that inspired KEdit, and he departed, taking his PC software with him. Basically, XEdit/Rexx was Emacs/eLisp, only yea
Re:Rexx and Kedit (Score:2)
Re:Rexx and Kedit (Score:2)
Re:Rexx and Kedit (Score:4, Informative)
>all "if "
Then be able to add in lines with a
>more "elseif "
or take away with
>less "# "
Or doing a search and replace on all files within the ring (ie currently loaded files). If vim can do this I would sure like to find the cheat sheet.
Yes $159 is steep I paid $79 and they have stopped production.
Response from Kedit (Score:3, Interesting)
[mailto:------------]
Sent: Wednesday, March 24, 2004 1:00 PM
To: '------------'
Subject: RE: Kedit Port
Hi Steven,
Thanks for the link. It's nice to see that KEDIT still has admirers.
To correct a couple of points in the threads I looked at:
1) "I send mansfield an e-mail every so often requesting a Linux
version or ask to open source the code but they just ignore me."
We never ignore Linux/Unix version inquiries but there really haven't
been many over the years. We've been consistent in st
Re:Rexx and Kedit (Score:5, Informative)
Brings back memories (Score:4, Interesting)
I doubt whether academics see much to love in the language, but I always found it easy to learn and very effective in getting things done. On the few occasions I have used it in recent years, I have still considered it highly useable (and I speak as someone who has used Perl, Python, Lua and even occasionally Ruby).
Rexx was great at the time, compared to ksh etc. (Score:5, Informative)
And REXX beat ksh hands down in terms of power and readability as well.
I gave a speech ~ 1991 at a REXX Symposium about "REXX in UNIX". I had the crowd of mainframe and OS/2 people literally rolling in the aisles with laughter as I tried to explain ksh syntax to them. I made slides of some examples from the appendix in the KSH book, and it was hilarious. Even the geekiest UNIX geek has to admit that sh / ksh are disasters as programming languages. REXX was 10000% better.
On the other hand, as I pointed out in my speech that day, there was another new language coming up that was 20000% better. It was called Perl. Perhaps you've heard of it.
REXX was originally intended to be a scripting language simple enough to allow non-professional-programmers to use. None of the UNIX scripting languages, including Perl, hit that mark - but REXX does.
I haven't written any REXX in 10 years, and haven't missed it. But it WAS a big step forward, and should have been a better success.
Re:Rexx was great at the time, compared to ksh etc (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't really agree here. REXX is a free form shell scripting language and stomps on everything else I have used for that purpose and that includes perl. You can write a simple sequence of commands with virtually no syntactic clutter and incrementally add expressions and control structures. With REXX, one can effortless take a program across the entire practical range of tranditional Unix shell languanges and far beyond.
Perl, of course, is more powerful but it is not really a shell language. It's syntax is more complex and gets in the way when you are trying to mix control code with command calls.
I still write bourne shell scripts. I also write awkward "shell" scripts in perl. But I would rather use REXX.
Re:Rexx was great at the time, compared to ksh etc (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Rexx was great at the time, compared to ksh etc (Score:2)
I think to go that far you really need to be looking at scripts wriiten in csh. sh may not be what you write the next killer FPS in, but it's a great tool for what it's generally used for - invoking other programs. (Including setting everything up nicely for those programs, with their environment settings and proper command-line arguments, etc.)
Re:Rexx was great at the time, compared to ksh etc (Score:2)
It still is a very powerful language. I even used it to write a simulation of nuclear spin diffusion in a sparse cubic lattice. Take that!!!
Is Perl ultimately more powerful? Maybe, but because Rexx can do 90% of what Perl can do, and because it's so damn easy to USE and it produces READABLE code, it is 150% more effective than Perl for me.
Aaah, there were the days when Rexx was the scripting language for Lotus Smartsuite..!
Why REXX Rocked So Hard (Score:5, Informative)
It is a completely typeless language, more or less -- basically, everything is a string, so the same variable could hold "87", "eight-seven", "00110111", "0x0117", or "Four Score and Seven" -- and the interpreter kept track of what operations were meaningful (i.e., adding "4" and "5" would yield "9", but adding "4" and "Five" wouldn't). Not surprisingly, it had a wide variety of string manipulation functions built in -- ROT13 could easily be accomplished with one command ("translate()"), for instance.
On the other hand, it also featured arbitrary precision mathematics, which is a pretty nifty and not altogether common feature for a language.
It was fairly portable -- I wrote REXX code for OS/2 and the Amiga, and was usually able to move the code from one to the other without having to worry about anything more than CR/LF translation. I was able to make use of old mainframe REXX code too, although it was usually ALL IN CAPS and ugly, which isn't really REXX's fault.
In OS/2, I used REXX primarily as a batch language on steroids (the OS/2 "CMD" CLI ran REXX programs directly as a batch language), but I also used it to do some pretty heavy text manipulation as well. On the Amiga, I used REXX for those purposes, but the main things I used it for were for interprocess communication, and for extending the functionality of REXX-enabled programs. When Matt Dillon added a REXX port to his hacked-up version of emacs for the Amiga, I was able to use REXX macros to turn it from a nice programmer's text editor into one which did everything I wanted, excatly the way I wanted. I wrote macros to toss and filter FIDONet messages to and from my text editor.
The same power was available to the REXX ports on other Amiga programs, from word processors to graphics editors. As an aide to interprocess communication, it could be used to allow your graphics editor to control a raytracer, or for your text editor to use the spellchecker in your word processor.
I made some nice money at a time when I was underemployed by writing REXX programs to control the input and outputs of a NewTek Video Toaster for a guy with a mid-sized video production business; and the code was straightforward enough, and REXX easy enough to learn, that the business owner could easily make any minor changes to it himself (at the same time, after he had used it for a while, he was able to think of more and more things for it to do, which kept me in groceries for another month or two). For that matter, I also made a bit of money writing a REXX programming column for an Amiga magazine, so I really have fond memories of REXX for being a language that allowed me to continue, well, eating food.
For a long time, IBM tried to convince Microsoft to use REXX as the macro language for Office, instead of BASIC; needless to say, if they had succeeded, we would be living in a universal paradise of peace and understanding right now, or something like that.
Even today, I find myself thinking of all the neat things I could easily do with OpenOffice or AbiWord or Photoshop or Semware's text editor or Audacity or Zinf if they had REXX ports enabled...
Re:Why REXX Rocked So Hard (Score:2, Interesting)
It's perfect, although somewhat slow, for working with very large integers. No special programming is required. Just add NUMERIC DIGITS 20 (for example) and you have 20 digit decimal numbers. It was very easy to translate an old program for Knuth's algorithm S (the spectral test) that once used UCSD Pascal's "long integers" (31 decimal digits + sign) into REXX.
Re:Why REXX Rocked So Hard (Score:3, Interesting)
Given that one o
Re:Why REXX Rocked So Hard (Score:2)
PARSE PULL
Ah, what a wonderful command...
Misread the title (Score:4, Funny)
I was like, "Damn straight!"
Cheers,
Justin
As expected (Score:2, Insightful)
and of course NetRexx (Score:3, Informative)
Rexxperts (Score:5, Funny)
Such as Rooby-Rooby Roo.
PLEASE MOD THIS UP... (Score:2)
Yes, but... (Score:2)
I like it (Score:2, Interesting)
So... (Score:2)
IBM REXX lives. You can pronounce that two ways
Baz
The Real Question... (Score:2)
Rexx Is Still Strong After 25 years (Score:3, Funny)
Bean Scripting Framework (Score:2)
Developers: Rexx Is Still Strong After 25 years (Score:2)
If you're looking for a simple scripting language, look at Tcl. The newest Activestate 8.4.6 release has a bunch of great stuff in it, but still support all the classic functions.
Fond meories of Rexx (Score:2)
Wow. This article brings back some fond memories.
You know you're a geek when the mention of a language from your past fills you with warm fuzzies.
Back in the old days (for me), when I was unable to get Unix for my PC, I went out and spent cash money on PC-DOS [ibm.com] from IBM, just so I could get Rexx. The coolest part was that command.com had been tweaked by IBM such that the any .bat file that started with a Rexx comment would be interpreted by Rexx when invoked (instead of the grungy batch language everyone
Mike & Java (Score:2)
Chip H.
mmm, 01d 5k001! (Score:2)
I'd kill for FLIST & REXX nowadays. FLIST was the best file manager _EVAR_. For awhile, some UK company was working on FLIST for OS/2 (back in my OS/2 days), but they never seemed to get that off the ground. Too bad - running OS/2 v2 in textmode with Tshell, that would've been the PERFECT companion app.
Am I the only one around who really wouldn't mind a modern multitasking textmode OS every now and then?
I used to dream in REXX/XEDIT (Score:2)
I've been meaning to try and get a XEDIT environment setup on my PC or Linux box, but have forgotten so much of it that I don't know if it'd be worth starting over or not.
Re: (Score:2)
Rexx? Rex? (Score:2)
Has anyone else heard of this Rex (one X) language?
Rexx better than Unix shells (Score:2, Insightful)
Rexx dates from the the 1970's, just like the Unix shells. However, unlike them, Rexx is a modern language. Unlike the quirky, bizarre, and barbaric Unix shells that have continued to roam
the earth, threatening intelligent life, Rexx has reasonable facilities for modularization, name
space management, variable scoping, standard means of
Re:My Input (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:My Input (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, Object REXX is available for Linux no-charge (as is) here [ibm.com]. I've been using it with MySQL to kludge up a home inventory, as well as a few data extraction scripts for a project at school. While I'm planning learning a more conventional scripting language for Linux, I still haven't found any that match the power of the PARSE... But I digress.
Re:My Input (Score:4, Informative)
Re:My Input (Score:3, Informative)
--REXX has syntax close to (compiled) Basic but has more powerful string-handling functions built-in. And CMS Pipelines... I haven't seen ANYTHING that compares to it in PC-land; it was very easy to use and had all-in-one power. I wish to
Re:My Input (Score:3, Funny)
Re:My Input (Score:2)
--It was quite a bit better than MS's native QuickBasic, although QB had some interesting features - such as viewing/editing user-defined functions in their own window.
Re:My Input (Score:3, Interesting)
I have some scripts I wrote in '
Re:My Input (Score:2)
The message ports are actually more of a AmigaOS/Exec feature than a feature of ARexx; the language simply wraps the existing feature of the underlying OS and makes it easy to send messages.
This would be called "inter-process communication" in modern days, and should be reasonably simple to implement in most Unix-like operating systems using UNIX domain sockets, or named pipes perhaps.
It requires apps to have a single main event loop, so that they listen to both UI events and events coming from the
Arexx & Bll Hawes (Score:3, Informative)
Bill did a fair bit of work for Commodore on contract, and also did a lot of testing and tool development for us (evil memory-allocation failure tools, for example). We tried to hire him on multiple occasions, but he preferred to stay in Boston.
B
Re:My Input (Score:4, Insightful)
It is unreasonable to compare technologies which aren't even available yet to one that has existed, and been relied on for very serious applications, for decades.
Guess what's the language of choice for HPC? Why, FORTRAN of course. When Oracle wanted a scripting language, did they adapt shell script? No, they picked Ada, merged it with SQL to create PL/SQL. For serious computation or data processing, maturity matters more than buzzword-compliance.
Re:My Input (Score:2)
If you look in Oracle's "shared pool", the memory it uses to manage internal operations, you will see something called DIANA - Descriptive Intermediate Annotated Notation for Ada.
Re:My Input (Score:5, Informative)
How can anything be less expensive than free? I haven't seen a charged-for REXX since VX-REXX for OS/2... and that was for its GUI extensions to REXX, not the language itself. Was this for some obscure platform where someone was charging for a REXX port? Or was using it going to cause you to have to upgrade hardware or something?
As far as powerful... what couldn't it do? Using the ADDRESS command, it can talk to the OS, communication libraries, datbases, etc. Admittedly it can get ugly doing a lot of that stuff. Did you perhaps mean other solutions were more elegant?
Garg
Re:My Input (Score:2)
Maybe the chargeable ones are better... I haven't tried 'em. But there's at least one free one for Windows.
Garg
Re:My Input (Score:2)
SOCKS2 = SOCKET('SOCKET','AF_INET','SOCK_DGRAM','UDP')
PARSE VAR SOCKS2 SOCKET_RC NEWSOCKETID
SOCKS12 = Socket('SetSockOpt',NEWSOCKETID,'Sol_Socket','So_ A SCII','ON')
PARSE VAR socks12 sockopt_rc junkinfo
SOCKS13 = SOCK
Re:one of a kind (Score:2)
Re:Memories (Score:3, Funny)
some stuff to defeat the lameness filter.