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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