On Fri, 14 Apr 2023 at 09:49, Alan Gauld <[email protected]> wrote: > > On 13/04/2023 20:35, Chris Angelico wrote: > > > REXX - where everything is a string, > > > It was quite the experience back in the day (as OS/2's native > > scripting language), > > I briefly met REXX on a mainframe, but I did play with OS/2 for > a year or two. Back when it looked like it might be a rival to M$ > > OS/2 running NeXTstep now that would have been a platform > for the 90s... both so near yet so far. >
OS/2 was the primary operating system in our house from about 1992ish until maybe the early 2000s - possibly 2010 even, depending on how you count things. After a while we needed to permit the occasional Windows system due to software that didn't work, and then I started deploying some Linux systems. Eventually the Linux boxes outnumbered the OS/2, and finally the last OS/2 system was virtualized under Linux, completing the transition. But along the way, I spent many years learning the way that OS/2 works, and that's been so valuable to me ever since. The system was built from the ground up with threads in mind, so every programmer, as a matter of course, just learned about threads. It's that simple. Want to make a GUI app? The rule is, you respond to a window message within a very few milliseconds; if you can't do your processing in that much time, you spin off a thread. Easy. VX-REXX actually did that for every message automatically, running thread zero for the system GUI message loop, and feeding messages to a REXX message loop; you could, of course, still spawn your own REXX threads as needed. The entire Presentation Manager and Workplace Shell (broadly equivalent to a Linux "desktop manager", I think? Kinda?) were object oriented; you would have a WPDataFile for every, well, data file, but some of those might be subclasses of WPDataFile. And it was fairly straight-forward to write your own subclass of WPDataFile, and there was an API to say "if you would ever create a WPDataFile, instead create one of my class instead". This brilliant technique allowed anyone to enhance the desktop in any way, quite impressive especially for its time. I've yearned for that ever since, in various systems, although I'm aware that it would make quite a mess of Python if you could say "class EnhancedInt(int): ..." and then "any time you would create an int, create an EnhancedInt instead". A bit tricky to implement. Ahh, the memories. Clinging onto several old Realtek RTL8029 cards long past the days when ten megabit networking was considered adequate, because I knew that I could ALWAYS rely on them. Seriously, those things just never gave me issues. Problems with networking? Slap in an 8029 and see if it's the card or something else. Need to download the driver before your network card works? Grab an 8029, boot with that, fetch driver, try again. Good times. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
