Come comments on other posts:
David Crayford wrote on 05/11/2018 02:22 PM:
> The fact that REXX does not have native support for VSAM
> data sets is a shocking omission.
This is available on s/VSE.
Paul Gilmartin wrote on 05/11/2018 12:25 PM:
> No sharing variables between EXECs
This is available on s/VM. (If you know what you are doing.) I don't
know if it will work on s/VSE or z/OS. It's use is considered
'non-standard' and usually avoided. Because of that, it's not something
that is obvious in the documentation but once someone shows you how to
do it, you will say 'why did I not see that'.
Steve Smith wrote on 05/11/2018 01:35 PM:
> REXX is adequate for a lot of things, but the // and % operators
> just make me mad
Every language has it's syntax. Maybe I would have picked something
else, but it is reasonable.
David Crayford wrote on 05/11/2018 02:22 PM:
> Lack of variable scoping is one of my biggest gripes. It means
> REXX doesn't scale. Of course, you can add "procedure expose"
> to functions but that soon turns into an intractable mess.
I disagree. This sounds more like you are trying to use programming
habits/methods designed for another language. Any programming 'language'
should be used as it was designed, not as some other 'language' was
designed. Are you trying to make REXX look like Perl, Java, PHP or bash?
David Crayford wrote on 05/11/2018 02:28 PM:
> Perl excels at one thing, regular expressions. Its syntax is ugly
> and it suffers from language bloat.
I equate regular expressions with vi. It takes a lot of use to get where
you can use it without looking things up, and if you get to that point,
you have lived a hard life. :-)
David Crayford wrote on 05/11/2018 02:30 PM:
> I'm at a loss as to why anybody would use OOREXX on platforms where
> there are a multitude of better languages to chose from. If it's
> because of familiarity coming from z/OS or z/VM then I would
> advise them to take the time to learn something new. Most modern
> scripting languages can be picked up in less then a day.
And the code produced is usually crap for the first 5,000 or 10,000
lines of code written in a new language. I had rather know a few
languages well than many languages 'so-so'. Bringing your existing
skills into play is always a good thing. Bringing your poor skills into
play for a production code is just stupid. (I am not against using your
poorer skills for one-off, one-time use code. That is the best place to
learn new skills.)
After all the cut-n-paste, I noticed that the biggest complainer is
David. That's ok. You hate Rexx, I hate 'C', and Perl and PHP and ....
Tony Thigpen
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