On Thu, Aug 12, 2021 at 9:23 AM Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfr...@ix.netcom.com> wrote: > > On Thu, 12 Aug 2021 06:15:28 +1000, Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> > declaimed the following: > > > >The default command interpreter and shell on OS/2 was fairly primitive > >by today's standards, and was highly compatible with the MS-DOS one, > >but it also had the ability to run REXX scripts. REXX was *way* ahead > >of its time. It's a shell language but remarkably well suited to > >building GUIs and other tools (seriously, can you imagine designing a > >GUI entirely in a bash script??). It had features that we'd consider > >fairly normal or even primitive by Python's standards, but back then, > >Python was extremely new and didn't really have very much mindshare. > >REXX offered arbitrary-precision arithmetic, good databasing support, > >a solid C API that made it easy to extend, integrations with a variety > >of other systems... this was good stuff for its day. (REXX is still > >around, but these days, I'd rather use Python.) > > > I was spoiled by the Amiga variant of REXX. Most current > implementations (well, Regina is the only one I've looked at) can just pass > command to the default shell. The Amiga version took advantage of Intuition > Message Ports (OS supported IPC). That allowed it to "address > <application>" any application that defined an ARexx port, allowing ARexx > to be used as a scripting language for that application (and with multiple > applications, one could easily fetch data from app1 and feed it to app2). > ARexx did not, to my memory, implement arbitrary precision math.
The same functionality was available in OS/2, but not heavily used. You could 'address cmd commandname' to force something to be interpreted as a shell command, but that was about it. However, I built a MUD that used REXX as its scripting language, and the default destination was sending text back to the person who sent the command; and you could, of course, still 'address cmd' to run a shell command. > I've not seen anything equivalent in my light perusal of the Win32 API > (the various guide books aren't layed out in any way to be a reference), > and Linux seems to use UNIX sockets for IPC... No way to search for a > connection point by name... > Win32 doesn't really have it. Unix sockets are kinda there but you identify something by a path to the socket, not the name of the application. But I think dbus is probably the closest to what you're thinking of. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
