I'm coming late to this thread. I never knew that ooREXX was from IBM, and it never occurred it to me to wonder whether it might be ported to TSO. So this question: Is there ~any~ object-oriented interpreter on the mainframe? Maybe it's time I learned a new language.
--- Bob Bridges, robhbrid...@gmail.com, cell 336 382-7313 /* It's never good news when a bunch of people learn the name of a boat. -Philip Bump @pbump */ -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU> On Behalf Of Seymour J Metz Sent: Wednesday, December 1, 2021 12:01 IBM certainly haven't abandoned ooRexx. It's my understanding that Rick McGuire works on it almost full time. The mailing lists still get quite a bit of traffic and the Github repo shows recent commit activity. If you're referring the fact that ooRexx hasn't been ported to z/OS then unfortunately I don't see IBM committing resources to a language in decline. It makes much more sense to port modern languages like Go, Python and runtimes like Node.js. Docker is going to be important for z/OS and it's written in Go so it's a no-brainer. We've been beta testing IBMs new clang LLVM z/OS port which is exciting in the fact that LLVM can be used to build a plethora of different languages. I particularly like Julia which has a similar syntax to Lua but can be strongly typed and is compiled and bench-tests show it runs at near C speeds. As we are discussing z/OSMF and REXX I thought I would mention the Z Open Editor plugin [1] for the VS Code editor. This includes the REXX LSP plugin [2] written by Broadcom which supports auto-completion, syntax checking as you type and symbol outlines. The COBOL and HLASM plugins are even better. It uses the Zowe CLI [3] to interact with the z/OSMF REST APIs for the Zowe System explorer [4]. It wasn't that long ago that you would have to pay for the likes or RDz to get this functionality but now it's free and uses cutting edge tools. The Zowe CLI does not have a dependency on Zowe being installed on the back-end. It's a client API and the only requirement is Node.js/NPM on your PC. The salient point is that z/OSMF is not just for just for GUI applications. The APIs are being used to build strategic eco-systems to modernize z/OS for new hires that didn't grow up using TSO/ISPF. Of course, this new tooling is mainly targeted at the new generation of mainframers and not at folks who don't like learning curves. But there is a lot of value to be had if you don't mind trying new things. The Zowe explorer VS Code extension has 46K downloads so it's quite popular. Although when you compare that to 46M for Python [5] you can appreciate why IBM ported Python to z/OS :) Yes, IBM is contributing to OOREXX, and I use it on Linux, but IBM is not upgrading REXX in TSO to OOREXX. In fact, IBM is not even upgrading REXX in TSO to the level of the ANSI standard. Yes, IBM has ported some, but not all, of the newer languages, and that is a good thing. ________________________________________ From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] on behalf of David Crayford [dcrayf...@gmail.com] Sent: Tuesday, November 30, 2021 9:55 PM --- On 1/12/21 1:55 am, Seymour J Metz wrote: > I just wish that they would acknowledge their abandoned child OREXX. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
