REXX compared to perl 
Author Message
 REXX compared to perl

When reaeding 'SAS compared to perl' an article of M. Haley (spelled
correctly?) came to my mind; his articles are reprinted in a dutch
computer magazine. He stated that for all administration tasks one
should use REXX as it is the only one which is supported on all
platforms.

Now this person is quite biassed towards old fashioned (but proven)
technology which is used in financial and administrative environments
and I don't trust such statements a lot, but still I became curious
about it. Is REXX something similar to perl, and if so how do they
compare?
--
_________________________________________________________________________
Peter Mutsaers.         |================================================



Fri, 03 Mar 1995 15:29:36 GMT  
 REXX compared to perl

 PM> When reaeding 'SAS compared to perl' an article of M. Haley (spelled
 PM> correctly?) came to my mind; his articles are reprinted in a dutch
 PM> computer magazine. He stated that for all administration tasks one
 PM> should use REXX as it is the only one which is supported on all
 PM> platforms.

Except for those platforms on which it's not supported.  And since it's
proprietary you have to *buy* the ports for many systems.  It does come
with VM/CMS though :-)

 PM> Now this person is quite biassed towards old fashioned (but proven)
 PM> technology which is used in financial and administrative environments
 PM> and I don't trust such statements a lot, but still I became curious
 PM> about it. Is REXX something similar to perl, and if so how do they
 PM> compare?

It's similar.  It's basically VM-PERL (hehe ;-) though it's been ported
to the Amiga and other systems.  It doesn't have anywhere near the
string-handling capabilities that perl does (I literally had to
implement rot13 by listing the entire alphabet 4 times, because it
doesn't support ranges).  It's used for a lot of the same sorts of
things perl gets used for, often by default, since it is the best/only
script language on many systems.
--
Christopher Davis   | ]CALL -151      

System Administrator| *3D0G            
EFF +1 617 864 0665 | ]CALL 768        



Fri, 03 Mar 1995 23:11:33 GMT  
 REXX compared to perl

Quote:


> PM> Now this person is quite biassed towards old fashioned (but proven)
> PM> technology which is used in financial and administrative environments
> PM> and I don't trust such statements a lot, but still I became curious
> PM> about it. Is REXX something similar to perl, and if so how do they
> PM> compare?
>It's similar.  It's basically VM-PERL (hehe ;-) though it's been ported
>to the Amiga and other systems.  It doesn't have anywhere near the
>string-handling capabilities that perl does (I literally had to
>implement rot13 by listing the entire alphabet 4 times, because it
>doesn't support ranges).  It's used for a lot of the same sorts of
>things perl gets used for, often by default, since it is the best/only
>script language on many systems.
>--
>Christopher Davis   | ]CALL -151      

>System Administrator| *3D0G            
>EFF +1 617 864 0665 | ]CALL 768        

It's a couple of years since I used REXX on a VM system so my experience
may be out of date (Given the speed at which IBM moves, I doubt it:-)

Rex did not have Regular expressions, or associtative arrays - two
things that are the essence of perl. Nor did it have the direct access
to system calls built in in the way perl does. Rexx is essentially
general purpose macro language for some other interpreter, e.g. VM or
Xedit.

Rexx is OK so far as it goes, but , IMHO, not a patch on perl.

BTW I saw a prerelease version of rexx on one of IBM's inhouse systems
years ago, it had a nice interface for fullscreen aplications. I was
most disappointed when the official release arrived with out it. Another
victim of IBM's marketing machine, there were at least two VM products
that would have been made redundant.

Cheers, Russell.
--
Russell Fulton, Computer Center, University of Auckland, New Zealand.



Sat, 04 Mar 1995 05:27:52 GMT  
 REXX compared to perl

Quote:

>It's a couple of years since I used REXX on a VM system so my experience
>may be out of date (Given the speed at which IBM moves, I doubt it:-)
>Rex did not have Regular expressions, or associtative arrays - two
>things that are the essence of perl. Nor did it have the direct access

Well things have moved in the two years since I worked on VM systems,
either that or my memory has faded. Several people have pointed out that
REXX *does* have associative arrays.

--
Russell Fulton, Computer Center, University of Auckland, New Zealand.



Sun, 05 Mar 1995 05:37:54 GMT  
 REXX compared to perl
REXX... reminds me of a dog, whereas Perl... reminds me of a camel.
camels are good for the long haul, especially when the going gets
tough, for example, in the dessert. dogs tend to run around in circles,
chasing their tails, getting very little done. dogs prefer to chase
rabbits than do work.

(arf, arf, arf. I just couldn't resist. :-)



Mon, 06 Mar 1995 20:40:24 GMT  
 REXX compared to perl

writes:

Quote:

> PM> When reaeding 'SAS compared to perl' an article of M. Haley (spelled
> PM> correctly?) came to my mind; his articles are reprinted in a dutch
> PM> computer magazine. He stated that for all administration tasks one
> PM> should use REXX as it is the only one which is supported on all
> PM> platforms.

>Except for those platforms on which it's not supported.  And since it's
>proprietary you have to *buy* the ports for many systems.  It does come
>with VM/CMS though :-)

There's a free port for education institutions from The Workstation Group,
and a public domain version (which I haven't seen) called regina.

Quote:
>It's similar.  It's basically VM-PERL (hehe ;-) though it's been ported
>to the Amiga and other systems.  It doesn't have anywhere near the
>string-handling capabilities that perl does

No, they're just different.  There are things I find easier to do in perl,
and things I find easier to do in REXX.  I don't have to put down one in
order to like the other.

Quote:
>(I literally had to
>implement rot13 by listing the entire alphabet 4 times, because it
>doesn't support ranges).

Yes it does, with the XRANGE function, which takes two one-byte codes and
returns a string consisting of all the bytes between them.

I tried to think of a reasonable way to implement rot13 which would require
typing in the alphabet 4 times, and couldn't.  I could think of a way which
required typing it in once, and a way which didn't require typing it in at
all, but four times?  No.  It's not fair to compare good Perl coding with
not-so-good REXX coding.

The comparison isn't really fair anyway, because of the differences between
the EBCDIC and ASCII character sets.  The alphabet is in a contiguous range
in ASCII, and it's not in EBCDIC.  (And even in ASCII, the range is correct
only for English, not for foreign languages).  

--

-----------------------------------------------------------------------



Tue, 07 Mar 1995 00:49:00 GMT  
 REXX compared to perl

 Jack> Yes it does, with the XRANGE function, which takes two one-byte
 Jack> codes and returns a string consisting of all the bytes between
 Jack> them.

When did XRANGE appear?  I know we didn't have it.  Could have been the
fault of the port to VM/VPS though.

 Jack> I tried to think of a reasonable way to implement rot13 which
 Jack> would require typing in the alphabet 4 times, and couldn't.  I
 Jack> could think of a way which required typing it in once, and a way
 Jack> which didn't require typing it in at all, but four times?  No.

translate 'ABCDE...abcde...' 'N..ZA..Mn..za..m'.  Or whatever the verb
was, I don't remember.
--
Christopher Davis   | ]CALL -151      

System Administrator| *3D0G            
EFF +1 617 864 0665 | ]CALL 768        



Tue, 07 Mar 1995 12:03:46 GMT  
 REXX compared to perl

:
:>It's a couple of years since I used REXX on a VM system so my experience
:>may be out of date (Given the speed at which IBM moves, I doubt it:-)
:
:>Rex did not have Regular expressions, or associtative arrays - two
:>things that are the essence of perl. Nor did it have the direct access
:
:Well things have moved in the two years since I worked on VM systems,
:either that or my memory has faded. Several people have pointed out that
:REXX *does* have associative arrays.

It's your memory fading: REXX has ALWAYS had associative arrays, and ONLY
associative arrays (no way to declare an array that's ONLY indexed by
consecutive integers, for example).
They DO (or did) have problems though!

The index notation is: stemname.indexvarname and it's NOT supported to
say, for example: myarray.(i+1)=23, you have to say j=i+1;myarray.j=23.

NO builtin is provided to sort an array in any way whatsoever, NOR to
extract all of the keys defined for it!  A *VERY* serious limitation in
my opinion.  Must have been at least six years ago that I wrote a
simple 370-BAL function to do that and sent it to Mike Cowlishaw as
well as posting it to IBM's internal use repository VMTOOLS (I was a
researcher with IBM at the time), but Mike took no notice...

It may be that either or both of these limits have been removed by now,
but they were still in the REXX language definition last time I checked
(the REXX def is part of IBM's SAA documents).  Pity.
--

CAD.LAB s.p.a., v. Ronzani 7/29, Casalecchio, Italia   Fax: ++39 (51) 6130294



Sat, 11 Mar 1995 16:26:15 GMT  
 
 [ 8 post ] 

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