There have been enhancements to various environments to better support REXX scripts, but enhancements to TSO/E REXX itself have been few and far between; there was a major enhancement to REXX in OS/2, later available on other platforms, but to the best of my knowledge IBM has never accepted a requirement to port it to and support it on TSO or other legacy environments.
Making ooRexx the flagship scripting language in z/OS would help significantly with keeping it viable. -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3 עַם יִשְׂרָאֵל חַי נֵ֣צַח יִשְׂרָאֵ֔ל לֹ֥א יְשַׁקֵּ֖ר ________________________________________ From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <[email protected]> on behalf of Timothy Sipples <[email protected]> Sent: Monday, July 1, 2024 10:00 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: z/OS 3.1 Enhancements & Support News Rony Flatscher wrote: >Adding support for Python is not bad, but it is good. Of course! Only on IBM-MAIN do we get to read complaints that IBM has significantly expanded the base z/OS operating system’s functionality. :-) >With no representative measurements and no definitions the >world agrees upon about measuring the importance of a language, >indexes like TIOBE are taken as a surrogate. One should never >forget that. Here’s what I wrote: >According to the current TIOBE Index (June, 2024), an attempt to rank the >popularity of programming languages, Python is #1. But wherever you rank it, >Python is at least reasonably popular. You may disagree with Python’s precise ranking. You shouldn’t disagree that Python is at least reasonably popular because that would be contrary to the ample available evidence. In the same announcement IBM also effectively added Perl to the base z/OS operating system, with IBM support. Perl is part of the IBM Open Enterprise Foundation for z/OS product. Perl is currently #27 on the TIOBE Index, but presumably everyone can agree that it easily meets the “reasonably popular” standard that seems like a good standard for base operating system consideration. Looking at the TIOBE top 10, Java (#4) is in the base operating system (and has been since the late 1990s; IBM deserves a lot of credit for popularizing Java with its early support; portions of z/OS itself require the IBM Semeru runtime environment), JavaScript (#6) is available at no additional charge (with optional fee-based IBM support), same with Go (#7), and SQL (#8) is obviously slightly popular on z/OS. :-) [SQL was born on z/OS’s predecessor (MVS), right?] Fortran (#10) remains optionally available for and supported on z/OS. IBM has done/continues to do lots of work improving C++ (#2) and C (#3) on z/OS. Visual Basic (#9) doesn’t really make much sense for z/OS IMHO, although IBM still markets and supports IBM BASIC/MVS (IBM Program No. 5665-948). That leaves C# (#5) to round out the top 10. It’s possible to run C# programs in the z/OS Container Extensions (zCX) and OpenShift on z/OS. >In the mainframe segment, REXX is much more important than Python. The importance of REXX has literally nothing to do with whether Python should be included in the base z/OS operating system. Does the importance of Java have anything to do with whether Python should be included in the base z/OS operating system? Or HLASM? Of course not. Python is now included (along with REXX and several other programming languages), and that’s nothing but great news. ...OK, maybe REXX’s importance is *slightly* relevant, and it’s good news again. You can call Python and Perl from REXX if you wish. Or Perl from Python, or Python from Perl, or REXX from Perl, or REXX from Python. If for example you like how Perl handles strings and want to “borrow” that functionality in a REXX program, go for it! You can even share such REXX “wrappers” with the CBT Tape collection, for example. You can now rely on Python and Perl being available to all z/OS licensees. (z/OS 2.4 or higher for Python, and z/OS 2.5 or higher for Perl.) Whether a particular z/OS licensee has configured Python and Perl is up to the licensee, of course. But that’s true of practically every z/OS component. z/OS is a very customizable and configurable operating system. In other words, when the base operating system expands in this way (more standard, included, supported, popular programming languages), everybody wins. Including REXX enthusiasts if you’re only slightly clever. As a separate matter (it is a separate matter!), you’re commenting about and advocating for improvements to REXX within REXX – not only for improvements to what REXX can do, which has just improved with this announcement. I have no objection FWIW. IBM has delivered some REXX improvements, and fairly recently too. The z/OS 2.2 support in SYSREXX for new operator commands immediately comes to mind as one example. If you want more, ask IBM in a formal way. I’d also note that there’s nothing stopping you from running NetRexx (as I’ve pointed out before – and someone else mentioned in this thread), and it runs better than ever. You can also run any other implementations of REXX in the z/OS Container Extensions (zCX), OpenShift on z/OS, and possibly z/OS UNIX System Services and the z/OS Container Platform. z/OS is really galloping forward with big expansions in runtime environment support. This IBM announcement includes GNU Make, provided with the IBM Open Enterprise Foundation for z/OS. GNU Make is quite useful for “building stuff” in more approachable, popular ways. The availability of GNU Make should make (pun intended) it easier for anyone to offer other REXX implementations for z/OS UNIX System Services and the z/OS Container Platform. That’s great news, too. ————— Timothy Sipples Senior Architect Digital Assets, Industry Solutions, and Cybersecurity IBM Z/LinuxONE, Asia-Pacific [email protected] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
