Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!att!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!lll-winken!ubvax!ardent!peck!rap From: rap@peck.ardent.com (Rob Peck) Newsgroups: comp.lang.rexx Subject: AREXX vs REXX Message-ID: <7841@ardent.UUCP> Date: 15 Aug 89 17:10:59 GMT Sender: news@ardent.UUCP Reply-To: rap@peck.ardent.com (Rob Peck) Distribution: comp.lang.rexx Organization: Ardent Computer Corp., Sunnyvale, CA Lines: 37 When preparing to give a tutorial on AREXX, I had the chance to study the IBM tutorial document on REXX, (my thanks to Lionel Hummel of PDC fame for telling me about it), the Colinshaw book (which at 42.95 was more than I paid for AREXX in the first place) and Bill Hawes AREXX reference manual. What folks will be interested in is that yes, all of the basics of REXX are in AREXX. However there are some extensions that are certainly Amiga specific. The one that comes to mind most vividly is the ability of AREXX to open/read/write files line by line or character by character. I don't recall seeing this in the IBM version. I suppose SOMEONE could go through the documentation (Colinshaw vs Hawes) and explicitly list the extensions so that folks familiar with REXX would see, as scripts are posted, where extensions are being used. However if there is relatively little traffic here, it may not matter. How about we just identify which of the two worlds it comes from (Amiga/IBM) and let the reader decide if it would be worth perusing the script for ideas. For those who might be interested, I'll be giving an AREXX tutorial at Ami Expo, Santa Clara, CA, on October 22, 1989. Primary emphasis will be on new user's intro, however the last time around, I had two (of 14) registrants with a great deal of experience and I was pleasantly surprized at having been able to answer their questions as well. I had posted a message that I am collecting scripts for public consumption and would be pleased to acknowledge their source. I make the same offer here -- if you have something you feel might be useful to a lot of folks, I'd be pleased to look it over and include it on disk (modified if necessary for its environment -- REXX->AREXX if appropriate). For example, I've created a file HELP.REXX that prints the comment lines from any AREXX script up to a point where the comments are interrupted by either a blank line or a line with no comment on it. The file works, but has a slight problem with nested comments (which are allowed by AREXX). When it is fixed, I'll post it. It is AREXX specific because it reads files, as compared to the equivalent program (segment) in the REXX tutorial that prints the help lines in a particular file (built in help) by using the 'sourceline()' function. Rob Peck