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One of the best products ever made, and resurrected StorageTek from chapter 11. Sadly sold to Sun back in 2006 and then Sun was sold to Oracle.
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I had a small amount of exposure to it due to a previous colleague having written a point of sale system in Rexx.
He went on to become one of the board members on the Rexx language association.
The enthusiasm he communicated was what propelled me into the world of .NET and object oriented programming - so indirectly I owe a lot to Rexx.
“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens
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I have not thought of Rexx in a few decades. I used it in a previous job with a compiler (!) on a PC. I am trying to remember which job - it was during it late 1980s or early 1990s.
__________________
Lord, grant me the serenity to accept that there are some things I just can’t keep up with, the determination to keep up with the things I must keep up with, and the wisdom to find a good RSS feed from someone who keeps up with what I’d like to, but just don’t have the damn bandwidth to handle right now.
© 2009, Rex Hammock
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Looks quite useful - thanks for posting that!
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I used Rexx in the 1988-1992 timeframe. I used it with IBM ISPF to create menus for development environment and screens for QA to submit batch jobs.
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I remember using REXX At Ft Sill. We were assigned tasks, then not allowed to do them (for about 8 months)). So we wrote a D & D game in REXX to kill time (and the local orcs)
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, navigate a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects! - Lazarus Long
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On the Amiga computers, you could use a version of Rexx called Arexx: ARexx - Wikipedia[^]
modified 6-Sep-22 21:01pm.
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Around 1992 or so, back when my ANSI-escape-sequence-Fu was strong, I was co-owner of a BBS running on an Amiga 2000. When we added a 2nd phone line, I wrote a 3-way chat extension in (A)Rexx (SysOp and 2 users). I still feel that Rexx is the most comfortable (for lack of a better word) of scripting/interpreted languages.
After the internet pretty much made BBSs a thing of the past, I wrote a USENET client in Arexx. Rexx is just fun.
PowerShell scripting would be really awesome if they could be written in Rexx. 😃
Eagles my fly, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
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Many years ago I used REXX a lot on VM. I wrote small things like macros for XEDIT, and larger things like a source management system. I also created a port to VSE (before IBM provided it there, thanks to IBM for delivering the assembler source with VM). I loved it. I miss it these days.
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Rexx had the same luck of the OS/2. I have used none of them.
"In testa che avete, Signor di Ceprano?"
-- Rigoletto
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Until recently REXX (or to be more precise the open source ooREXX) was the scripting language of our comercial LabMaster FA product. We have now replaced REXX with Python, but I have written and maintained a lot of REXX code while working here. ooREXX is quite interesting as it adds objects to REXX while maintaining compatiblity with classic REXX.
Interestingly many years a ago we tried to recruit someone with REXX experience but we only managed to get a couple of CVs, both of which had very limited experience of the language.
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I programmed some utilities in Rexx for IBM hosts but although I liked it, it was only as part of a project and I didn't have time to go deeper into the language.
As an addition to your information about Rexx, I remember that since I didn't have easy access to our client's hosts, I tested my utilities on a curious Commodore Amiga porting of Rexx.
Sorry for my bad English
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I liked it a lot, used it about 28 years ago. The integration with Xedit and especially CMS Pipelines were very handy.
Frank
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I used Rexx extensively back in the mid to late 80's. It was such an improvement over EXEC-2 that scripting was fun.
The string parsing ability using "Parse" was amazingly powerful for parsing files.
A fun prank was to fire up XEDIT/Rexx in full screen mode on a terminal someone left unattended to simulate the VM/CMS logon screen and return humorous logon rejection messages.
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KEXX and KEDIT are still available after those many years from KEDIT.COM. I created countless scripts in many different environments and countries. The syntax is the same as REXX/XEDIT.
Simche Scherer
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I use it, lightly, as the macro language for a text preprocessor called PPWizard.
The language is different enough from my usual C#/SQL that it takes me a while to remember how things work and I do a bit of head scratching every time.
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I programmed a whole training administration system in Rexx, with online registration via VM. I wrote some core modules in IBM System/370 Assembler to keep a chain of blocks used to handle program requests without conflicts, and another to simplify writing to a green screen 3270 terminal. One power of Rexx is string handling, for which I have had to write my own libraries in other languages. I taught a class in it once to a large insurance company. I was very productive with Rexx. Best language I've ever worked with. Debugging was also great. I could view a stream of executed statements as they were executed and save it as a log.
-- modified 15-Oct-20 9:27am.
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I recall that Rexx was included in the NT Resource Kit for NT4. Never did get around to using it though. Always seemed interesting but I could do all that was needed with other languages.
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I was an IBM "Customer Engineer" in the early 80's and wrote a TSO/ISPF app (c/w menus) in REXX to let field service personnel access mainframe and peripheral diagnostic data without having to write JCL. I was stationed at the Bank of Nova Scotia datacentre
Later, when I was an Instructor at the IBM Education Centre in Toronto, I wrote an Interactive Questionnaire Facility on VM to allow Instructors to create and administer course and instructor evaluations. It also had a reporting component for printing out the results.
I love that language. It was a joy to use and got me hooked on programming. Enough to make me shift disciplines from hardware engineering to software. I've never looked back.
Thanks for evoking the memories.
Cheers,
Mike Fidler
"I intend to live forever - so far, so good." Steven Wright
"I almost had a psychic girlfriend but she left me before we met." Also Steven Wright
"I'm addicted to placebos. I could quit, but it wouldn't matter." Steven Wright yet again.
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I used ole Rexx on VM/CMS at Boeing circa '89 
As far as mainframes go, VM/CMS was A OK by me.
XEDIT. Ugh. That takes me back. Not terrible. But also not great
We would always use our BIGMSG EXEC to blast each other's
screens full of some silly message.
Never used it on Windows, but used it on my Amiga 500.
They called it ARexx over there.
Fun at the time but I'll not be pickin it back up again sigh.
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I used REXX extensively as a System Programmer in a VM/DOS/VSE/MVS shop back in the day. So easy to use compared to Assembler and PL/I. When I was promoted to manage the application programming staff I built a full project management application with it.
The simple, natural syntax was really refreshing.
Totally off topic, I also enjoyed hobby programming in Forth, especially the excellent books by Thom Hogan.
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Ah yes Forth! What a fun language
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Heh, I loved Forth back in the day. I've written Forth systems for the z80 and for the 68000 processors (for industrial control systems). One was a subroutine threaded multitasking version used as an intermediate language. The development application on the PC would compile to Forth which would than be downloaded to the industrial controller where it would be compiled to machine code. Was definitely a fun project.
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Sometime in the late 80s I was working on a new CICS system for DOS/VSE, written in PLI. I was barely trained in CICS but still the "expert" as far as my team went. I was also the PLI guy, the other programmers were COBOL folks.
I wrote a system in Rexx to run under VM and generate skeleton code for transactions from text descriptions. That got enabled even beginners to create and test dummy transactions with the perspective users, iterating to get the UI to the point where they liked it, learning PLI as they worked with the generated code.
Of course looking at code was how we learned a language back then anyway. We had reference manuals but not books intended to teach the language.
My favorite Rexx feature: uninitialized variables had the value of their name, so there was no such thing as an NRE!
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