On Sat, 7 Dec 2002 09:46:28 EST, "A. Harry Williams" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>On Fri, 6 Dec 2002 13:01:10 +0800 John Summerfield said: >>On Fri, 6 Dec 2002 12:42, you wrote: >>> Oh no, I didn't mean to impugn Regina at all. I last saw it long ago >>> (1996?), and gave up on it real quickly. I fuzzily recall that it only >>> seemed like a close cousin to the IBM Rexx dialects. Many OS/2, TSO, and >>> CMS execs I'd written broke in unexpected places -- IIRC, only the most >> >>I tried it briefly back then too; I had a working REXX script that Regina >>couldn't cope with so I dropped it too. > >I've spent some time working on some Rexx execs to have them work the >same on CMS, TSO and Regina on Windows, most recently a TXT2PDF from >Leland Lucius that Lionel includes with XMITIP for TSO. The biggest >problem is the IO. There really isn't any IO that is consistent >on those three platforms, much less deal with the performance implications >of the IO routines on those platforms. Except for that and an ASCII-EBCDIC >issue that needed to be handled, TXT2PDF is about 3,000 lines and it ported >flawlessly. The same two issues for some SMF decoding routines I've >written. I've been very happy with Regina and have used it to do some support >for TSM and Notes for SHARE. All it does is make me miss CMS Pipelines even >more. > > >> >>But that was six years ago. I didn't think the fact OREXX was broken then was >>means much now either. >> >>John Summerfield >/ahw When I do work on creating compatible REXX programs, I determine the environment, set some flags and variables. I have common routines line eraseit/openit/readit/writeit/closeit which take name and (for MVS) ddname parameters. The common routines check the environment flag and do the right thing. For MVS it is usually EXECIO, for classic REXX on NT it would be linein() calls. The input is stemmed array, and so is the output. There is a buffer variable which says how much to read at a time. I've been pasting that into new REXX programs for years. john alvord
