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Programming IBM IT Technology

Rexx Is Still Strong After 25 years 288

Posted by timothy from the not-the-tiny-PDA dept.
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."
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Rexx Is Still Strong After 25 years More

Rexx Is Still Strong After 25 years

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  • wait a minute (Score:5, Funny)

    by Stevyn ( 691306 ) on Wednesday March 24, 2004 @01:24AM (#8653205)
    I thought it died off 65 million years ago.

    • Re:wait a minute (Score:5, Funny)

      by alphakappa ( 687189 ) on Wednesday March 24, 2004 @02:12AM (#8653452) Homepage
      I thought ti died off 65 million years ago

      No, THAT was Fortran.
    • You think REXX is old? You should meet the CLIST I just wrote. Mostly it hobbles around TSO, complaining about these darned REXX kiddies (no respect, you know?), and makes outrageous claims -like it invented the ampersand.

      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)

    by ShallowThroat ( 667311 ) on Wednesday March 24, 2004 @01:25AM (#8653207)
    but it's no FORTRAN.

  • Rexx IS going strong (Score:3, Funny)

    by rcastro0 ( 241450 ) on Wednesday March 24, 2004 @01:26AM (#8653216) Homepage
    Seeing is believing:
    Rexx going strong [ndtilda.co.uk].

  • in other news (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 24, 2004 @01:27AM (#8653227)
    punch-card lovers association held its annual conference and proclaimed punch-cards superior to all modern IDEs, compilers, editors and debuggers.

  • Call me ignorant, but... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Faust7 ( 314817 ) on Wednesday March 24, 2004 @01:31AM (#8653246) Homepage
    I'd never heard of REXX before. Looking at the FAQ, I found my explanation:

    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?
    • Probably like most other mainframe languages, REXX is being used because when the programs were originally written, REXX was all there was- so rather than rewrite everything, REXX programmers just keep modifying the original code.

      • Re:Call me ignorant, but... (Score:5, Informative)

        by Aussie ( 10167 ) on Wednesday March 24, 2004 @02:28AM (#8653512) Journal
        REXX is/was the replacment for things like EXEC & EXEC2. Really crappy langauges. If you have used these, you will understand why people use and like REXX. Though it is a pity IBM never released REXX for free, it is a fun sorta language, easy to learn and still quite powerful, though things like stemmed variables have a lot of system overhead.
    • REXX was way ahead of its time when it came out, and when I used it in 1989, it was still very powerful and useful, though it was playing catchup with the personal computer world.

      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
    • I think, perhaps the real question you are asking is: are IBM mainframes at the forefront of modern computing, do they have a hidden impact the average Slashdot reader is unaware of. My guess is yes. I am not a mainframe guy myself, but it is my understanding that they are still very much used and very important with a fairly large worldwide market. Perhaps some of you REXX folks can give us some examples of the ways mainframes are still used? I'm too lazy to go look up IBM's sales figures for mainframe
    • REXX certainly shouldn't be on the forefront of modern computing but tragically still is since the popularization of that 1960 throwback language C crippled the programming language industry 20 years ago and led to thhe requirement that all "innovations" be built on top of a language that has less string handling than FORTRAN and all the friendliness of a bad assembler.

      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

  • Remember aRexx? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by bennomatic ( 691188 ) on Wednesday March 24, 2004 @01:31AM (#8653247) Homepage
    This reminds me of wasting hours and hours on my Amiga500. Yeah, it only had 3MB of RAM and no hard drive, but give me a blitter chip and four channel audio any day! Anyway, there was a great version of Rexx for the Amiga that became the defacto scripting dialect of the day. Great stuff, that aRexx.

    • Re:Remember aRexx? (Score:5, Informative)

      by admbws ( 600017 ) on Wednesday March 24, 2004 @01:36AM (#8653278) Homepage Journal
      Ah, yes! If only we had something like ARexx here on UNIX. The "ARexx ports" concept really helped with things like information exchange, automation and "remote control". For those who don't know what it is, here's an explaination on ARexx, and briefly explains ports [nethkin.com].

      • Re:Remember aRexx? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by gilesjuk ( 604902 )
        But can you imagine the fun you'd have with ARexx these days with viruses? I know the Amiga didn't really suffer that many of them (mostly the old bootblock viruses in the floppy disk days) but imagine an Email app with an ARexx port :)

        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, Insightful)

      by akac ( 571059 )
      Yep. I wrote a full accounting package that filled in information in Professional Page and the Amiga Fax software in a completely integrated fashion. It was a complete office solution at a time when none existed at that a price small businesses could afford.

      Order management, full accounting, catalog creation, quotes, etc...

      I loved arexx.

    • Re:Remember aRexx? (Score:3, Informative)

      by DR SoB ( 749180 )
      3MB OF RAM??? NO WAY DUDE!!!

      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)

    by ChiralSoftware ( 743411 )
    So strong I've never heard of it, and looking through the websites, all the faqs are simply lists of links to other faqs, and when I finally get to one that isn't a list of links, it just gives me some information about problems I might be having with Rexx executables, with no info anywhere about what Rexx is. Let's see, there's Java, C++, C, perl, Python, Intercal [catb.org] and a host of other languages with clear and obvious purposes and faqs, and therefore I should care about Rexx because? Maybe this would be a
    • So strong I've never heard of it,

      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
    • So strong you never heard of it just means that you have only worked on PCs.
      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)

    by iamwoodyjones ( 562550 ) on Wednesday March 24, 2004 @01:34AM (#8653263) Journal
    it wants its do loops back

    say "Counting..."
    do i = 1 to 10
    say "Number" i
    end

    Yuck!
    • I dont get what is so yuck about simple readable code. Perhaps you need to ask why Unix has sh bash tch perl python ruby, wheras z/OS has clist rexx rexx rexx rexx and rexx.

      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)

    by gmuslera ( 3436 ) on Wednesday March 24, 2004 @01:34AM (#8653267) Homepage Journal
    at least, back when i was using OS/2. When started with Linux, perl seemed very ugly and unintuitive to me (specially when comparing how text is parsed in both languages), but it was so easy to use the output of other programs (compared with REXX even under linux) that I finished to like it and using it for everything instead of REXX.

    • Re:Rexx was great... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by broter ( 72865 )
      I've heard a lot of people saying good things about REXX. Sadly, it only took one bad experience to sour me to the language.

      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
    • Nah. REXX was great back when I was using CMS on a 3270 terminal connected to a System 360 at least 5 years before the appearance of OS/2. It was my first scripting language and very few since have held a candle to it.

      Unfortunately, I've forggen practically everything I ever learned about it.

  • go go rqqrtnb! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by lysander ( 31017 ) on Wednesday March 24, 2004 @01:35AM (#8653275)
    It was funny then and it's funny now. [slashdot.org]

  • Well.. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Rhesus Piece ( 764852 ) on Wednesday March 24, 2004 @01:41AM (#8653305)
    I think it's great that a language has survived so long. That being said.. although it has it's purposes, it'd be hard to say that it is "strong". It may be used. It may be actively developed. However, "strong" is probably an overstatement.
  • Who could forget ARexx [goodnews.net], Amiga's implementation of REXX... I scripted EVERYTHING from DirectoryOpus...

    Sigh... I miss my Amiga. :-)

  • Rexx and Kedit (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Camel Pilot ( 78781 ) on Wednesday March 24, 2004 @01:45AM (#8653328) Homepage Journal
    I still use Kedit, a win32 programmer's editor, that uses Rexx as the macro language and it rocks (both the editor and the macro environment). Even though Mansfield software has quit supporting Kedit about a decade ago it is still the best editor on the windows platform. I tried switching several times - first to Brief then to Codewright and then Slick edit but came back to Kedit because of if clean interface and performance.

    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)

      by Stalky ( 31519 ) on Wednesday March 24, 2004 @02:47AM (#8653583) Homepage
      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.

      You are looking for The Hessling Editor [sourceforge.net].

    • Count me as another KEDIT lover. I still have a copy on my machine and fire it up when I have some complex need not satisfied by another editor. However, for all KEDIT's power, the ten years of neglect have taken their toll. My use of it continues to decline. Modern IDEs typically just provide a more productive way to get the day-to-day work done.

      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)

        by Stalky ( 31519 )

        Modern IDEs typically just provide a more productive way to get the day-to-day work done.

        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

        • eh, if there was a PC guru then, it wasn't ahead of emacs / elisp. TECO Emacs already had macros, and Multics Emacs (implemented in MACLISP) came around in 1978.
    • I love Kedit and it is one of the few things (come to think of it, maybe the only thing - well, that and TurboTax once a year) that keeps me from switching full-time to Linux. Every so often I try it with the latest Wine but no luck yet (it opens, but the screen becomes corrupted after a while - my gut feel is that it is something simple to fix, and if I ever find time to work on Wine this would be the one thing I would attack first - I've even thought of putting up a bounty for getting Wine to work with K

  • Brings back memories (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Mostly a lurker ( 634878 ) on Wednesday March 24, 2004 @02:02AM (#8653410)
    I have rarely used REXX in recent years, but have fond memories of it from the late 1970s and the 1980s. In those days, I used to do a lot of development under VM/XA. Anyone who previously had to script in the old EXEC or EXEC2 could not help but see REXX as an unbelievable advance. Later, I used both PC REXX and the (inspired by REXX) KEXX macro language packaged with the KEDIT editor to write some very decent tools. Performance was not stellar, but that was really the only serious drawback (and, even there, it was better than most other interpreted languages of its day).

    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)

    by SamDrake ( 651779 ) on Wednesday March 24, 2004 @02:06AM (#8653431)
    Other mainframe scripting languages were just disasters. I vividly remember replacing more than 1000 lines of EXEC-2 scripts with about 100 lines of REXX, and thinking that Mike Cowlishaw should be knighted.

    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)

      by erice ( 13380 ) on Wednesday March 24, 2004 @03:56AM (#8653801) Homepage
      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. :-)

      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.
      • Rexx was incredibly cool at the time: - implemented on a dozen platforms - code was multi-platform - extremely easy to use / easy to extend / easy to maintain - could run it from MVS JCL - was the macro language for ISPF I used rexx for the following: - converted hundreds of cobol programs from cobol 68 to COBOL II (required parsing code, replacing periods with end-ifs, end-searchs, etc) - created 'asserts' for several programming languages - in which a simple function key would confirm the syntax. - creat

    • Even the geekiest UNIX geek has to admit that sh / ksh are disasters as programming languages.

      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.)
    • Not just "at the time"!

      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)

    by Ray Radlein ( 711289 ) on Wednesday March 24, 2004 @02:20AM (#8653480) Homepage
    REXX was very much like the Python or Perl of its day, in that it is a scripting language which can be used for everything from job control to add-on macros to interprocess communication.

    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...

    • On the other hand, it also featured arbitrary precision mathematics, which is a pretty nifty and not altogether common feature for a language.

      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.
      • Back then, when I was first working with REXX, my wife was finishing up her second Master's degree in Math. Her thesis involved some pretty hairy prime decomposition and polynomial factoring, and required some pretty high precision math. She had just discovered that PL/1 wouldn't be able to keep up, and I kept jokingly suggesting REXX. Instead of REXX, she went with Maple, an arbitrary precision math package from Waterloo, if I recall (the name seems like a good hint that it was Canadian).

        Given that one o
    • Don't forget the amazing

      PARSE PULL

      Ah, what a wonderful command...

  • Misread the title (Score:4, Funny)

    by QuantumFTL ( 197300 ) * on Wednesday March 24, 2004 @02:40AM (#8653558)
    At first I thought the title read Rexx is Still Wrong After 25 Years.

    I was like, "Damn straight!"

    Cheers,
    Justin

  • As expected (Score:2, Insightful)

    by badmammajamma ( 171260 )
    Of course slashdotters have to rip on anything that wasn't written originally for linux or isn't open source. REXX was a great tool in its day. Shit, I would still use it over the vast majority of scripting languages today.

  • and of course NetRexx (Score:3, Informative)

    by jobbegea ( 748685 ) on Wednesday March 24, 2004 @04:06AM (#8653843)
    NetRexx [ibm.com] is just your normal Rexx, but it compiles into Java byte code:

  • Rexxperts (Score:5, Funny)

    by Citizen of Earth ( 569446 ) on Wednesday March 24, 2004 @04:09AM (#8653855)
    Many of the world's 'Rexxperts' will be in attendance

    Such as Rooby-Rooby Roo.
  • does it do DOT NET?????

  • I like it (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Zusstin ( 518914 )
    WHen I started my first job , to work on Airline Applications - TPF based, on VM/CMS - I started using REXX. Then, at times, whenever I required a particular action on CMS file(s), I started writing REXX EXECs to do it for me. Although my demands were not that tough, as most of the times it was only to help me save my time while working, I found it extremely easy to write EXEcs. And I had no formal training in REXX. For me, its easy to understand the REXX commands/syntax. As I have no experience on Perl or

  • So... (Score:2)

    by Bazman ( 4849 )

    IBM REXX lives. You can pronounce that two ways :)

    Baz
  • Maybe this language is alive now, but in thirty-two years, it will be extinct, and we will have to send time-travelers [johntitor.com] back to unearth it's powerful secrets!

  • Rexx Is Still Strong After 25 years (Score:3, Funny)

    by dwalsh ( 87765 ) on Wednesday March 24, 2004 @07:03AM (#8654399)
    Good Dog.

  • IBM (and now Apache) project, Bean Scripting Framework [apache.org], or simply BSF, allows embedded REXX scripts to still be used in Java programs. This is one reason why I (and others) still use (and maintain) REXX scripts from upwards of 20 years ago -- they still work, and nobody around knows what the hell they are trying to do :)
  • Nice to see that people are still using it. But, like Applescript, it is most useful when lots of applications support it. Because it doesn't really have that support anymore, it is pretty much useless on the "Big Three": Windows, MacOS 10, Linux x86.

    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.

  • 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 Cowlishaw is also responsible for Java on the AS/400 (iSeries), and probably a major factor in IBM's interest in Java back in the JDK 1.0 days.

    Chip H.
  • Oh yeah, doin' the REXX on the VM system at UMR in 1986, woo! The school sucked, but that was fun.

    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?
  • Back in college I did a lot of work on the mainframe in REXX. I knew that I'd been working too hard when my dreams at night would encounter a situation (non computer related - such as say no milk for cereal) and in my dream I'd solve the problem via some rexx code and/or XEDIT macros.

    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.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • I seem to remember using a language called Rex (one X, I think) while I was taking classes at Harvey Mudd. It wasn't a scripting language -- it was some kind of functional language with parameter pattern matching.

    Has anyone else heard of this Rex (one X) language?

  • Rexx better than Unix shells (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    To all you Unix bigots who want to call Rexx a dinosaur, you'd better take a good look in the mirror, because to the rest of the world, you don't look pretty.

    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

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