> Has anyone used Object Rexx? What do you think of it compared to Regina?
Yeah, I have; but I've not played a lot with Regina ... its dialect seems a tad foreign to me; but that's only because of my IBM upbringing. I'm not a good one to judge the relative usability and friendliness of each. Object Rexx is a direct inheritor of Mike Cowlishaw's original REXX effort as implemented on VM. It supports everything that the original REXX did in the same way, and adds the ability to create C++-like classes with embedded methods. There are some new keywords (DO OVER, for example) that work with classes which turn out to be huge "noise-level" code-savers and quite convenient to work with once you get used to it. There are also some default classes to support I/O streams, for example, that are also very, very nice. It *does* support all of the old (non-OO) syntax & semantics, at least as far as I could tell -- in many cases you have the choice of doing things in the old procedural syntax or the new OO way. Veteran REXX coders won't be disappointed. If it were up to me, I'd spread Object Rexx (as opposed to vanilla Rexx) over the entire IBM OS set -- there aren't versions available for TSO or CMS. It's pretty nice. If you've got the right Linux machine (there are no s390x/ELF64 binaries available), you can download it and try it for free (I believe). I strongly suggest doing so if you're curious .... it comes with PDF documentation. I use it on all of my Linux ix86 machines ... I'd love to use it on my zLinux ThinkBlue64 machine; but there are no s390x binaries available for it. Am still looking fo replace ThinkBlue with a slightly more modern s390x based distribution that handles ELF32 modules in compatibility mode. Object Rexx is the primary reason. --Jim-- James S. Tison Senior Software Engineer TPF Laboratory / Architecture IBM Corporation [EMAIL PROTECTED]
