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- Newsgroups: comp.lang.rexx
- Path: sparky!uunet!mcsun!sunic!sejnet.sunet.se!eric
- From: eric@sejnet.sunet.se (Eric Thomas)
- Subject: Re: Stealing ideas from Unix (was Re: Blanks, REXX, and portability...)
- Message-ID: <1992Sep1.210452.1@sejnet.sunet.se>
- Lines: 34
- Sender: news@sunic.sunet.se
- Reply-To: ERIC@SEARN.SUNET.SE
- Organization: SUNET, Stockholm, Sweden
- References: <BtwuwM.CB1@watserv1.uwaterloo.ca>
- Date: Tue, 1 Sep 1992 21:04:52 GMT
-
- In article <BtwuwM.CB1@watserv1.uwaterloo.ca>, giguere@csg.uwaterloo.ca (Eric Giguere) writes:
- > In article <1992Sep1.165241.1@sejnet.sunet.se> ERIC@SEARN.SUNET.SE writes:
- >>Ok Scott, say I give you a unix playstation with a copy of the source code for
- >>LISTSERV (25-30k lines of REXX), and pay you by the hour to make it work under
- >>unix. How much money will I save if I give you a REXX interpreter to make the
- >>conversion easier?
- >>
- >>The answer is I'll lose money, because it will take you about 1-2 months to
- >>realize it is much faster to rewrite everything in C than to try to reuse the
- >>REXX code with the interpreter.
- >
- > The smart answer would probably be: do it in Perl. A step above C in
- > abstraction, but built around the Unix mentality and supports all the
- > networking functions you'd need....
- >
- > And people, don't get me wrong: it's not that I don't support this debate
- > over the use of spaces in REXX, but please let's keep cool heads about us.
- > Not only will that prevent people from tuning out of the debate (because that's
- > what I do when a "mine is better than yours" mentality prevails), it'll also
- > keep the message lengths shorter.
-
- I've re-read my posting 3 times and I frankly can't see where it supposedly
- says that mine is better than yours. All I see is a statement that it is a
- pointless effort to attempt to port a large REXX application from system X to
- system Y, because REXX (like all scripting languages) is full of system
- commands (like LISTFILE, EXECIO, COPYFILE, ls, grep, mv) which generally work
- only on one system. And the reason I pointed it out is that it is not obvious
- to many people, especially people with a lot of experience in "traditional"
- languages. A 25-30k lines FORTRAN 77 program written for CMS is probably much
- easier to port to unix than to rewrite from scratch, this is true of most
- standardized languages, but it doesn't work with REXX, no matter how compliant
- your interpreters are.
-
- Eric
-