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[Events] 25 years of RexxANN.lu
Posted on 24-Mar-2004 09:33 GMT by Gareth Knight12 comments
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March marks the 25th anniversary of the Rexx programming language, and to celebrate the Rexx Language Association is hosting the 15th Annual Rexx Symposium at the IBM Research Labs in Boeblingen, Germany, from May 2 to 6, 2004. March marks the 25th anniversary of the Rexx programming language, and to celebrate the Rexx Language Association is hosting the 15th Annual Rexx Symposium at the IBM Research Labs in Boeblingen, Germany, from May 2 to 6, 2004. Full details of the Symposium can be found in the 2004 Rexx Symposium Announcement.
25 years of Rexx : Comment 1 of 12ANN.lu
Posted by /////ANDRE on 24-Mar-2004 09:30 GMT
Yeah, they're going on about it at slashdot.
Even a few Amiga people showing up.
25 years of Rexx : Comment 2 of 12ANN.lu
Posted by Elwood on 24-Mar-2004 10:03 GMT
So Arexx or Python. Which is the best ?
25 years of Rexx : Comment 3 of 12ANN.lu
Posted by Atheist2 on 24-Mar-2004 11:42 GMT
Why the heck isn't it going to be in AOS4.0????

It's a legend, apparently. (Same as Amiga/AOS!)


AmigaOne! AOS4.0! What's past is past? Not necessarily SO!
25 years of Rexx : Comment 4 of 12ANN.lu
Posted by Joe "Floid" Kanowitz on 24-Mar-2004 12:27 GMT
Happy birthday, REXX. I've got to admit, I hardly knew ye.

(And in retrospect, there were reasons why.)
25 years of Rexx : Comment 5 of 12ANN.lu
Posted by hippie2000 on 24-Mar-2004 12:52 GMT
i dont think that ARexx was a good choice to implement in AmigaOS,
except for the remote ports it offers. Also no good choice was the installer
language (a waste of time to learn)...

IMHO the evolved language Perl(5) and a good OS wrapper module should have
been the choice...

well, now we are stuck with ARexx and Installer (both imho dont fit to Amiga)...

Sure, perl is ported to Amiga since long time (thanks to the GG effort),
but scripting on amiga is still very lowend, and i dont believe that this
will change with the introduction of a new OS version...

not very professional imho...

those who for example know the BASH shell, know what a lowend shell we have
on amiga. however, also bash is ported so everybody can choose freely to use
a more evolved solution...
25 years of Rexx : Comment 6 of 12ANN.lu
Posted by john on 24-Mar-2004 12:54 GMT
In reply to Comment 3 (Atheist2):
Arexx _is_ in OS4. The 'problem' is that it will be 68k only.

AREXX cannot be ported to native PPC as the writer was a little upset at being stiffed by C= and refuses any questions/dialogue regarding it at all.
No matter, AREXX stuff runs plenty fast enough on fast emulation systems and I'm sure the same can be said of OS4 systems in the hands of beta testers.

-john
25 years of Rexx : Comment 7 of 12ANN.lu
Posted by Paul on 24-Mar-2004 13:07 GMT
In reply to Comment 6 (john):
But Regina (http://regina-rexx.sourceforge.net/) could be easily be ported. The Amiga specific extensions shouldn't be too hard.
25 years of Rexx : Comment 8 of 12ANN.lu
Posted by brotheris on 24-Mar-2004 13:24 GMT
In reply to Comment 6 (john):
Is it legal to bundle it even as 68k version ?
25 years of Rexx : Comment 9 of 12ANN.lu
Posted by Don Cox on 24-Mar-2004 13:39 GMT
In reply to Comment 5 (hippie2000):
"i dont think that ARexx was a good choice to implement in AmigaOS,
except for the remote ports it offers. Also no good choice was the installer
language (a waste of time to learn)..."

IMO ARexx has been ideal as a scripting language for the Amiga. The Trace facilities make it very easy to debug your programs. Variables do not have to have types, arrays don't need to be declared. All makes for fast, efficient programming.



"IMHO the evolved language Perl(5) and a good OS wrapper module should have
been the choice..."

Perl wasn't around in 1986 when Bill Hawes was writing ARexx. I like Perl, but it does not have any good Trace feature, and it is IMO too complicated for simple scripts. It would be useful if somebody would code a bridge from Perl to the "ARexx" ports (which are just message ports), so it could be used as an alternative.

This has already been done for Python. If we had a choice of ARexx, Python or Perl for scripting, that would be ideal.


"well, now we are stuck with ARexx and Installer (both imho dont fit to Amiga)..."


IMO ARexx has been one of the great strengths of the Amiga. Applescript came along much later, and AFAIK a much smaller proportion of Mac programs are scriptable.

Anyone who writes an Amiga program should make every command that is accessible in the GUI also accessible from a script. Some coders are lazy about this, or leave the ARexx port as an afterthought. ADPro and Pagestream are both examples of good practice.
25 years of Rexx : Comment 10 of 12ANN.lu
Posted by takemehomegrandma on 24-Mar-2004 13:41 GMT
In reply to Comment 6 (john):
I thought that Commodore's Arexx license expired with quite early versions of the operating system (was it 2.x already?), but was shipped by Commodore anyway despite this? But I can be totally wrong about this; it's only a vague recall ...

Perhaps Hyperion has made a special license agreement for OS4?
25 years of Rexx : Comment 11 of 12ANN.lu
Posted by Jupp3 on 24-Mar-2004 17:35 GMT
In reply to Comment 7 (Paul):
>But Regina (http://regina-rexx.sourceforge.net/) could be easily be ported.

Well optimized emulated 68k code might outperform some "less optimized solutions"

And it wouldn't need just porting, it would have to be modified to work exactly like "old" arexx on Amiga does...

And imho, speed isn't really an issue with arexx - it's language that tells software what to do, it usually doesn't do anything complex...
25 years of Rexx : Comment 12 of 12ANN.lu
Posted by Raffaele on 25-Mar-2004 01:04 GMT
Is anyone in Germany with well configured Classical Amiga who could make the effort to show his machine to the Convention?

I think that Arexx could amaze the guests at the convention, because not many of them could think we had such a beautiful porting, well integrated into the OS and capable to manage a vaste amount of facilities to enhance work with Amiga...

A presence of old Amigas and new Amigas (even Peggys) could increase our visibility.
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