Hi Rony,
I know ooRexx. I ported it to z/OS 10 years ago but it was buggy and
slow. There is zero chance of IBM or a vendor wasting resources on REXX
today as there is no market for it. Now we have Python on z/OS REXX is
very much a legacy language. That's even more pertinent with the shift
from TSO/ISPF to IDEs.
I could be wrong and I'm willing to be turned. I'm a big fan of Lua
which I consider to be the most elegant language I know. It can easily
be used to write DSLs for configuration or model development. How do I
write a DSL in REXX?
https://leafo.net/guides/dsl-in-lua.html
On 29/06/2022 9:41 pm, Rony G. Flatscher wrote:
Hi David,
On 29.06.2022 14:06, David Crayford wrote:
On 29/06/2022 6:37 pm, Seymour J Metz wrote:
Sme, but manageable. The article Safe REXX at
<http://www.rexxla.org/Newsletter/9812safe.html> and
<http://www.rexxla.org/Newsletter/9901safe.html";> has some tips on
avoiding REXX pitfalls.
What's the point in managing something when you can just use a better
language? It's a good time to be working on z/OS as we have an
abundance of choice. That's not entirely obvious on this forum where
every problem seems to be met with a ham-fisted REXX solution.
Yes, Crayford's bashing REXX again. I have some experience of using
z/OS UNIX REXX services but I didn't find it productive. Maybe
somebody with more knowledge than me could post a snippet that
demonstrates how to recursively traverse a directory tree printing
the entries.
The problem is that this is not constructive. Not sure why it is so
important for you to bash REXX even if it makes you look bad at times.
REXX in the mainframe world (I learned REXX for the first time on a
VM/CMS 370 system a few decades ago) is of course a great - and
unmatched - productivity tool and as a result over the decades there
has been an incredible amount of useful REXX inventory created. Best,
REXX is easy to learn and easy to use like no other language of that
power.
If you were to know ooRexx you would realize that porting it to the
mainframe would even help yourself and everyone else to settle on a
few important languages and not being forced to go astray with this
language for solving this particular problem, that language for
solving that particular problem, and then suggesting to use yet
another language for ...
Porting ooRexx to the mainframe would allow for keeping the existing
REXX programs running with ooRexx (the design of ooRexx - by demand of
IBM's customers - is such that it is compatible with classic REXX).
Therefore one can use ooRexx to run existing REXX programs and one
could use ooRexx to create new classic REXX programs.
Only then would one become able to take advantage of the many new
ooRexx features like becoming able to fetch e.g. stems by reference,
or using ANSI REXX' "address...with" (e.g. redirecting input from
stems or standard and error output to stems), being able to create
public Rexx routines (can be directly called from another REXX
program) and much more.
Doing so would be sensible as it allows for exploiting the already
known programming language, its environment and existing REXX
infrastructure; one would gain new abilities and options from then on.
Also the important property - being able to learn and understand the
language quickly - remains intact with ooRexx, it just increases the
problem solution capacity dramatically by embracing the
object-oriented paradigm the way it does.
If Business administration students are able to learn ooRexx from
scratch in just four months such that in the end they have become able
to create programs for Windows and Microsoft Office (after only two
months) and portable (running unchanged on Windows, Linux and MacOS)
applications including OpenOffice/LibreOffice and even JavaFX (!) GUIs
(after another two months, exploiting all of Java which gets
camouflaged as the dynamically typed, caseless ooRexx, without having
to learn a single line of Java; one only needs to be able to read and
understand the JavaDocs).
So it is feasible and not expensive at all to teach newcomers to
program in ooRexx. Putting ooRexx into the hands of REXXperts like the
ones that can be found here, would be a real and important boon ...
As IBM has been successfully porting quite a few programming languages
to the mainframe, it should be feasible to port ooRexx as well as
ooRexx is purely implemented in C++ (it has in addition a very nice
and powerful native API to the interpreter) making a modern and
powerful incarnation of REXX available on the mainframe where REXX was
born ...
---rony
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