Charles Mills wrote: 

>I am definitely a Rexx fan but I have to agree that the necessity for hacks
like these does not speak well for the language.

 

Eh, any worse than leading "my" or "h" or whatever TF it is that folks use
in whatever those new-fangled languages the kids are using? As Gil wrote,
you can use a digit, but it's fuglier.

 

>While one can write 40,000 line applications in Rexx -- pretty amazing for
what is basically a .BAT file language -- I think perhaps the larger the
application the less suitable Rexx is to the task. Rexx is at its best in
the 3 to 300 line range. IMHO

 

Depends, of course. I wrote the Levanta (Linuxcare) Linux deployment
management code for z/VM all in Rexx, and it was several thousand lines but
nicely modularized and SUPER easy to manage and debug. But arguably that was
entirely within the original Rexx charter of interfacing to system commands,
just an extreme case.

 

I also wrote an email gateway back in 1999 between
Internet/PROFS/SMTP/Exchange, translating note formats as needed, detaching
and decoding attachments, etc., all in Rexx. I forget how many thousands of
lines that was, but it was also easy to manage and debug. The worst part was
the TNEF support, which was a CMS Pipelines stage written in Rexx.

 

Note that both of these relied heavily on CMS Pipelines, which is akin to a
CPAN thingy. (Or is that "to a CPAN"? Not sure of the terminology!)


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