On Wed, 16 May 2018 10:47:35 +0800, David Crayford wrote:
>
>The unfortunate thing about REXX is that it hasn't improved over the
>years. Here's a post from 1995 highlighting features from Object REXX
>that would be
>useful in classic REXX
> http://www.markcrocker.com/rexxtipsntricks/rxtt28.2.0252.html. The
>do/over loop is fantastic and would provide a means to do basic
>introspection
>on stem variables. Returning stem variables from functions, great!
>Little things like that would significantly improve the language.
>
I like that awk accesses environment variables as a pseudo array,
ENVIRON[]. A program can even "do/over" ENVIRON. But this
presumes an orderly implementation of environment variables.
I note that these enhancements add a couple characters, '[' and ']'
to the vocabulary. I suspect Cowlishaw avoided these because they're
troublesome or ambiguous on many mainframe terminals. How many
plaints about baffling syntax errors are answered with "What code page
is your terminal using?"
Is it the intent of OoRexx to avoid changing the semantic of any construct
in standard Rexx? If so:
RETURN STEM.
alters the meaning of that standard Rexx instruction.
Gee. If you import all the neat features of OoRexx into Classic Rexx,
doesn't it become OoRexx? Why not just switch to OoRexx?
>[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python_(programming_language)
>[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lua_(programming_language)
>[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_(programming_language)
-- gil
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