RE: Can CL write to a disk file (Vernon Hamberg)

Vern,

Answers imbedded in your quotes: 

"Thanks for the explanations and clarifications."

 Your welcome on the explanations and clarifications on REXX.    

"I really like REXX but find that in many shops there will be
resistance due 
to "who will maintain it when you are gone?" Nonetheless, it does its
job 
superbly."  

Understand the RC (Resistance to Change) factor.   Some thoughts are: 
Using a new and potentially better tool should not be dissuaded by fear
because I believe there are sufficient books, publications and folks out
there that know REXX that someone that must support REXX in an iSeries
shop should find all the help they need.   We must keep growing.

"To add to your comments, parsing the parameters of a command is a 
dream in REXX, compared to CL - especially lists, IIRC."

Superb point.

"One neat thing is that array-like structure elements can be referenced
by a 
name (text) instead of numbers, or as an alternative. This is similar,
it 
seems to me, to what I think are called associative arrays in Perl. (Do
I 
have the terms right, or mixed up some?) In fact, I see similarities 
between REXX and Perl, although I've not done much with the latter."

Yep, its really handy to use names that have easy meaning vs. trying to
keep track of what a number means, especially for someone that has to
pick up the maintenance of the program.   Don't know about Perl as I
never learned it.   

"So preach on, brother, REXX is cool!!"

I shall, when its an appropriate solution.

"BTW, there's even something called ObjectREXX in Windows - easy 
object-oriented programming. Didn't that language play a part in some 
release of WDSC or WebSphere Development Tools? Mayhaps it still does -

there is usually something called RXAPI.EXE that I see running in Task

Manager, and that looks suspiciously like a REXX (RX) something or
other."

Yep, there's ObjectREXX for Windows and at least one vendor created a
compiler for REXX under VM.  If it became popular on the iSeries, I'm
sure they'd create one for that platform as well.  

Not sure about REXX and Websphere but it wouldn't surprise me, again,
since REXX is found on all IBM platforms I know of.   

Take care,

Dave