acphssrw@csuna.UUCP (News Manager) (05/27/88)
Some thoughts on ARexx: (1) Non-ARexx owners don't seem clear on what it is. Bill Hawes described it to me at one point as "an interpreted programming language disguised as a macro processor." It is as easy to learn and use as any other language, but combines the power of a programming language with the ability to compose and send commands to other programs on your system. Please note that this does NOT preclude or replace a macro processor or script language or what-have-you in other programs; in fact, such a thing would be required for an ARexx interface. What ARexx does is give you the ability to have a full-up programming language for your application without having to write one yourself (which would of course be different for every program). Just a few simple primitives and an ARexx port and you're done. (2) This means that the modest $50 cost of ARexx becomes negligible very quickly: your applications programs will be cheaper because they take less time to develop; you can get by with less RAM because your applications will be smaller; and you'll save a lot of your own time because you don't need to learn GNU Lisp to program your editor and a scripting language to program your terminal emulator and a macro language to program your database and ... Besides, $50 increases the cost of even a 512K single-drive A500 by about 6%. (3) ARexx includes inter-process communication, but with the added ability that a human can easily create and modify the inter-process messages using a human-readable interactive program. Example: I recently got from BIX a terminal emulator called VLT, by Willy Langeveld. It is a VT100/Tektronix emulator with a script language and an ARexx port. Someone else on BIX has written a phonebook maintenance system in ARexx. The latter uses TxEd Plus to create and maintain the phonebook entries and send dial commands to VLT. It isn't real sophisticated (yet), but then it is less than 200 lines of ARexx code. Stephen Walton, representing myself swalton@solar.stanford.edu Cal State, Northridge rckg01m@calstate.BITNET