utoddl@ecsvax.UUCP (Todd M. Lewis) (04/08/89)
Hello, net.
On two seperate occasions now a prominent director of one of
the computing-related entities here on campus (better vague than
sorry) has elaborated on REXX/AREXX as being, "You know, like PL/1!"
Can anybody out there get this to make sense to me, or are
my fears justified.
ps: the director in question is not the director of my group,
nor of any group above or below me.
_____
| Todd M. Lewis Disclaimer: If you want my employer's
||\/| utoddl@ecsvax.uncecs.edu ideas, you'll have to
|| || _buy_ them.
| ||
|___ (Never write a program bigger than your screen.)UH2@PSUVM.BITNET (Lee Sailer) (04/09/89)
I, too, have heard a lot of people say REXX is, u no, like PL/1. Personally, I think this is a red herring. The IF, DO, and some other control structures are vaguely like PL/1, but as a complete language REXX is no more like PL/1 than it is like ICON. For example, one of the richest features of REXX is that you can use the string manipulation functions to create a string that is a syntactically correct REXX command, and then you can execute it. Now, you cannot do this is PL/1, though you can in languages like Lisp, for x.
bts@sas.UUCP (Brian T. Schellenberger) (04/17/89)
The syntax of REXX is, indeed, derived from PL/I. I wouldn't let that scare you off, though. The functions supplied, the I/O, and lots of other things are different. REXX doesn't have pointers, so PL/I pointer messiness doesn't matter, and also lacks declarations, so PL/I messiness there also doesn't matter. I does have psuedo-associative arrays and lots of other nifty things that PL/I doesn't have. I am no fan of PL/I, but like ARexx quite a bit . . . -- -- Brian, the Man from Babble-on. ...!mcnc!rti!sas!bts -- "Every jumbled pile of person has a thinking part that wonders what the part that isn't thinking isn't thinking of" -- THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS