On Fri, 20 Jun 2025 18:32:59 -0500, Glenn Knickerbocker <[email protected]> 
wrote:

>Mike's explanation in The REXX Language was that "SAY . . . typically causes 
>it to be displayed (or spoken, or typed, etc.) to the user."  He had blind 
>friends (and/or antagonists) using talking terminals among the early users, so 
>for them SAY really did mean "say."

This makes for an entertaining story, but I suspect SAY was an actual design 
decision. Mike designed REXX for VM to support multiple future environments 
(first 2 were CP & CMS). REXX instruction names (e.g. SAY, PULL and more) must 
avoid conflicts with all future environments. Clearly, he knew about the CP msg 
and message commands where "msg abc" can't be both REXX and CP. SAY and PULL 
are unlikely to conflict with any environment.

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