“What is it with old languages? I only have to mention REXX while talking about Mumps and someone (the sort of person who remembers that the original, circa 1970-80, MUMPS was actually an O/S, language and integrated DBMS all in one – I can relate to that, perhaps why I like iSeries too) jumps up to say how much they liked it. I liked REXX partly because (like many other much-loved languages), it actually had a personality attached to it – Mike Cowlishaw.”
was – apart from the OO approach – REXX
Forget about VB, Perl, Ruby, Python and so on.
Rexx Rules
I’d used REXX back in the 1980s and 1990s and it was such an easy language to solve tough problems.
The syntax was a bit unusual but if you had worked with PL/I or some interpreted block-oriented languages of the time, it seemed to fit pretty well.
It ran well on OS/400, OS/2, and PC-DOS 7 but should have been deployed on every system.
The OOrexx site seems to be windows only. Is there a Linux version ?
ooRexx is available for quite a few Linuxes, also e.g. for Solaris and there now is even a beta for MacOS X.
If you look at the homepage “http://www.ooRexx.org“ follow the download link. Also the developer mailing list carries infos on beta versions.
ooRexx is being actively developed with interesting news being introduced to the public at this year’s International Rexx symposium in Austin, Texas, which takes place in April. The call for papers and presentations together with the venue can be viewed at “http://www.RexxLA.org“.
One area will be scripting/automating OpenOffice with ooRexx in a platform independent manner, ie. all scripts run unchanged on Linux and Windows. (ooRexx can be even used as a macro language starting with OOo 2.0.)
Discussions on Rexx issues among other groups take also place at “news:comp.lang.rexx”.
Mike Cowlishaw probably liked Rexx because he wrote the damn language himself.
Nowadays, see ooRexx. There is also Netrexx but that is years out of date and no source code available.
ARexx was a version for the Amiga, endorsed by Commodore that was used in what seemed like every professional software package. It was really nice.
Rexx is a great language! I wrote an alphanumeric paging system and an automated trouble ticketing system with it. Rexx lives!
I followed the download link to http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=119701
and it only shows documentation for Linux :
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/oorexx/oorexx-docs-3.0.0-rv3.tgz…