Re: [IBMiOSS] OPS Version Information

On Oct 19, 2016, at 7:27 PM, John Yeung <gallium.arsenide@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Wed, Oct 19, 2016 at 6:41 PM, Jon Paris <jon.paris@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Surely Rexx doesn’t require anything though Aaron? - I have always been surprised that it is not used more for work like this. For production stuff it can be a bit slow - but for installs and tools - more than good enough.

I will always have a great deal of admiration for Rexx, and I had some
good fun playing around with it myself, but I am not surprised it
doesn't make most people's short list of tools:

1. It is just plain weird. Not in a bad way, but experience with most
other languages doesn't translate that well to Rexx.

2. At least on the i, it is highly optimized as an augmentation of CL,
including the fact that it lives in QSYS. This makes it awkward to use
if you're logging in via SSL and only have visibility to PASE.

3. As I recall, Rexx is very cool in terms of the language itself,
particularly string processing, but doesn't come with many "batteries
included". There's no Rexx library for handling files and directories
and manipulating IFS paths, is there? Sure, its string handling makes
it kind of fun to build all that stuff yourself from scratch, but
that's not the most productive, and rolling your own is a recipe for
missing corner cases or getting them wrong.

Point 2 is a back-breaker in this context. Aaron is working almost
exclusively in PASE. And virtually all the open source stuff for i is
being developed in PASE, for PASE. I think he cracks open a green
screen only to install PTFs and what not.

If PASE came bundled with its own Rexx, I think it would have a
fighting chance. But it would probably be even better for typical PASE
users if PASE came with Perl.

John Y.
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