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Text File | 1995-05-24 | 5KB | 96 lines

Subj:  ARexx Column
Date:  Mon, May 8, 1995 3:15 PM EDT
From:  [e-mail]
X-From: [e-mail] (Merrill Callaway)
To: [e-mail] (Don Hicks)

The Sixth International REXX Language Symposium
by Merrill Callaway

ARexx was not on the agenda of the Sixth International REXX Language
Symposium held at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) on May
1-3. I attended to debut my new book on REXX for OS/2 on the IBM PC:
The REXX Cookbook. Amiga developers everywhere have had a wretched
twelve months, and have moved on to other things, because as much as
we love the Amiga and still use it (I published my IBM book with
Pagestream on my Amiga), we have to face the reality of making a
living. I found it poignant and ironic that at this symposium, I
finally got to meet my ARexx heros, Willy Langeveld
(rexxarplib.library and VLT) and Marvin Weinstein (who helped to
bring REXX into commercial use with ARexx). We had lunch together and
agreed that the mainstream is still largely clueless about what you
can do with REXX (well, with ARexx on an Amiga). Marvin described his
presentation at the very first REXX Symposium after which IBM asked
to meet with him in his office privately for an hour. They stayed
four hours and kept asking, "Can we do that?" and Marvin kept saying,
"No."  IBM had asked Dr. Weinstein to come out to Boca Raton,
Florida, but he declined. After lunch Marvin and Willy invited me to
come back to their offices where I saw plenty of Amigas.  Marvin has
a maxed-out A-3000 on which he demonstrated David Junod's product Zed
REXX, a GUI builder for ARexx that lets you make list windows with
slider bars and all sorts of cool objects (I recommend it, too).
Willy showed me his port of Maple (mathematics visualization) to the
Amiga.

Don't get your hopes up. These guys are Amiga lovers all right, and
are about as high-powered as you can get, but they operate in the
ivory tower environment of academia and are not likely to influence
the mainstream market or Escom or anyone else about ARexx or the
Amiga. I gave Marvin a copy of my new book because even he,
reluctantly, is switching over to OS/2 soon. In fact, it looks as if
OS/2 will eclipse even the Amiga-ARexx environment once Object REXX
is released to the public next fall.

The only other thing relevant to the Amiga is that IBM is GIVING AWAY
the source code for Object REXX in Linux C++ format. This means that
ARexx could theoretically have all the benefits of a full blown
Object Oriented Programming (OOP) language if someone wanted to port
the Linux code. O-REXX is a real OOP language with inheritance,
methods, properties, and communication built in. Client and Server
applications can be easily written without the programmer knowing
anything about communications software! We saw several demos
programmed by a "marketing person" and not a programmer. O-REXX is
available now in beta on IBM OS/2 DevCon CDs.

Although I am bitterly disappointed about the Amiga's immediate past
and I am skeptical of its future, I believe REXX has a real future in
OS/2, and I am loyal to REXX because it is such an excellent product.
Interprocess Control (IPC) is something that at present only Amiga
users know well, but those days are numbered. Once O-REXX comes on
line, then the rest of the (PC) world will know what we have known
since 1987, but don't expect to take any credit. You will have to
content yourself to know that those who really agree with you are a
small and highly intelligent minority who are not being heard so
well. Meanwhile even in the PC mainstream, REXX must fight the same
sort of battle against the public ignorance fostered by MicroSoft,
which defines OOP to be only what they can at present produce (a few
GUI objects), not what it really is. They are dressing up 1960s
computer science (Visual Basic) and defining it, and a lame data
exchange mechanism (OLE), as OOP while ignoring and omitting true OOP
properties such as inheritance, messaging, and truly
reusable/portable code. O-REXX is a state of the art OOP language and
in fact the first language of this sort to be easy to program. The
new syntax fits over the old without breaking any older code. Only
the concept has changed. Instead of everything being defined as a
string, now everything is defined to be a pointer to an instance of
an object (a string is just one type of object). I hope someone out
there will port O-REXX to the Amiga (David Junod? Bill Hawes?) for
love if nothing else. I for one plan to keep using my Amiga until it
breaks and I cannot fix it.



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From: Merrill Callaway <[e-mail]>
To: Don Hicks <[e-mail]>
Subject: ARexx Column
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