For what it's worth, I've had that need. Only twice, I admit: 1) At one employer I overheard my boss talking on the phone; apparently they'd been tracking viri by looking at firewall logs and analyzing connections that had been refused. (A machine that sends 10 000 packets to one IP address is probably fine; one that sends 1 packet to each of 10 000 IP addresses is a virus looking for more victims.) But they were doing it by loading 2MB or so of firewall logs into Excel, then sorting and culling and parsing; it took them a couple of hours to do it each time. I downloaded Regina REXX onto my machine at work and spent that amount of time writing a REXX that read the raw firewall extract and created a CSV in about 20 seconds. REXX makes ~very~ short work of parsing. At the time I don’t think I knew VBScript, but it surely would have been harder.
2) A developer I know asked me to work out a way to turn his plain-text error messages into a decent format for user documentation, in PDF. We worked out a plan where I'd turn his plain text into RTF, then get Word to read the RDF and write it out as PDF. (I don't know anything about PDF, you see. I didn't know anything to speak of about RTF, either, but I found the specs on-line and learned.) I tried doing that in VBS or VBA, but the parsing just got too hard. That’s when I broke down and got myself a copy of ooREXX, which I had lusted after ever since I heard about it but never had an excuse. Turns out ooREXX has a lot of capabilities that I had to study up on before I could use it effectively, so I took a day or two off to read and play. But it works now. Again, I see REXX's most valuable strength as parsing strings. Occasionally that strength is valuable outside TSO. --- Bob Bridges, [email protected], cell 336 382-7313 /* A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something that can be learned in no other way. -Mark Twain */ -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <[email protected]> On Behalf Of David Crayford Sent: Wednesday, June 29, 2022 11:27 ....I just can't see any use for REXX outside of TSO/ISPF. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
