Development, round II

From: Philip.Belben_at_powertech.co.uk <(Philip.Belben_at_powertech.co.uk)>
Date: Wed Jan 28 11:30:41 1998

> >REXX on a PC? I think I have heard (very dimly) of this (there was
> >something called REXX-88 or some such name when I was at IBM) but I
> >haven't used REXX for years! What does it run on? Will it run on a
> >Compaq 386? An IBM AT?
> You can probably find REXX in a lot of places... There's even a shareware
> version on Macintosh. And if there's an old IBM programming language on a
> Mac, it's almost definitley on a lot of other platforms. Did REXX start on
> the IBM mini/mainframes or is it from somewhere else? Has anyone seen a
> copy of Cobol for Mac? MicroFocus used to make it, but it seems the Cobol
> crowd has abondoned Macintosh...

Thanks everyone for their help. I shall sometime consider PC-DOS with
REXX as an environment for my AT or possibly one of my Compaqs... Am I
right in thinking that OS/2 _won't_ run on an AT?

ORIGINS OF REXX

I met REXX in what I believe to be its native habitat - as the macro
language for VM/CMS running on an IBM 370 descendant mainframe. It
replaced a language called EXEC2, whose main distinguishing feature was
% signs everywhere (although I can't remember what they meant). This in
turn replaced a language called (you guessed it) EXEC. REXX is/was
quite a nice language to use, but some features rendered it unsuitable
for serious programming - numbers, for example, are stored as strings of
digits in the character code of the machine you are using...

Philip.
Received on Wed Jan 28 1998 - 11:30:41 GMT