This time it was the first time in a long time that we were able to release a new version of ooRexx
coinciding with the International RexxLA symposium, which was a nice success and many people
attending in person (great to meet and learn about each other). Next year the International RexxLA
symposium is planned for Barcelona and it will be announced as soon as dates are known, hoping again
for many persons to show up in person and many presentations given.
BTW, RexxLA will create conference proceedings of this year's International Rexx symposium in the
next days which should be published via the Internet, like in the newer past. The symposium's
schedule with the interesting presentations can be found at
<https://www.rexxla.org/events/schedule.rsp?year=2025>.
---
Now work has started on the next release of ooRexx. The question and motivation for this posting is
to discuss what should be done with what priorities.
1) Personally I think that it is important to go first through the bug tracker systematically and
assess the bug reports. Some may be outdated, some may not be reproducible, some are hanging out for
a long time, some are of high priority.
The suggestion would be to fix as many bugs as possible in the next months by anyone interested and
capable of doing so. If we fixed, let us say 20 bugs, we should create a micro-release like 5.1.1 to
get the bug fixed version as early out of the door as possible. Also, doing another release so
shortly will allow us to overhaul our procedures and scripts to improve the process, ideally making
everything automatic such that any further releases can be done quickly.
2) Adding new functionality to ooRexx, but being wary to "keep the language small and easy to
learn". One source of interesting experimentations with ooRexx and how extensions (popular in many
programming languages) could be implemented in ooRexx is Jean Louis' executor project (based on
ooRexx 4.1) which also has a very interesting implementation of Unicode, which we need in today's
world in ooRexx: <https://github.com/jlfaucher/executor>. Jean Louis has been documenting his
researches and his assessments and what he implemented how. Right at the top there are links to
these documentations. One that helps to jump start is "Overview of changes" at
<https://github.com/jlfaucher/executor/blob/master/sandbox/jlf/_changes.md>. Please make yourself
acquainted such that we can start discussions on the developer lists about these experiments to
decide what to add how to the ooRexx mainline.
---
Any other suggestions and ideas welcome!
Any comments?
---rony
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