Author Topic: Rexx Language (Read 5404 times)

rgzu · « **on:** November 25, 2004, 12:38:14 pm »

Does anyone know the REXX has ever been ported to the Zaurus 5500? From my searching I would assume not, but sometimes these pieces of software can hide in odd corners of the internet as I have found out before!

rgzu · « **Reply #1 on:** November 26, 2004, 01:33:16 pm »

Just looked back at my post and realised that I must have had a brain fart. It should have said 'REXX language'. Still I guess someone who knew this language would have realised what I meant anyway LOL

Tehas · « **Reply #2 on:** November 26, 2004, 09:31:08 pm »

I haven't seen it and I also came up empty with some searches. I also checked the IBM site since they ported some other stuff for the Zaurus machines. (I love using REXX on MVS & OS/390.)

Did you look into other more traditional Unix languages such as Bash, awk, or Perl?

rgzu · « **Reply #3 on:** November 26, 2004, 11:36:33 pm »

Tehas,

Thanks, I suspected as much.

I have a version for my Pocket PC that works great and very easy to use. What I like about REXX is that being very BASIC like, it's very easy to knock up some quick programs. I used to love OPL on Psions and REXX language is the nearest thing to a fully featured freeware Basic interpreter. As it seems to be ported to most platforms I thought I'd have a look to see if it had been ported to the Sharp 5500. As it's not available I'll make do with other means but I find REXX far more readable than perl examples I have seen. The same goes for awk.

technojunkie · « **Reply #4 on:** November 27, 2004, 10:17:41 pm »

I would imagine that if it's a command line only program you probable could just get a copy of the source code and try to compile it for ARM. The worst thing that could happen is it will fail...

johnw · « **Reply #5 on:** December 02, 2004, 06:45:51 pm »

Anyone remember Watcom's VxRexx for OS/2? I wrote a couple of REXX programs with that back in the day & found REXX very easy to work with.

RichS · « **Reply #6 on:** December 02, 2004, 10:29:23 pm »

Just in case no one noticed. IBM has released linux rexx to the public! There's a notification on their web site here:
http://www-306.ibm.com/software/awdtools/o...inux/index.html

Leading to this:

http://www.rexxla.org/

And if anyone does a Z version, I would sure love it!!! (as an old/and still/ OS2 user)

doseas · « **Reply #7 on:** December 03, 2004, 01:02:30 am »

I used to love to whip up Rexx scripts for getting applications to work together on my Amiga. Now that was a useful OS!

Haven't seen Rexx yet for the Zaurus, but, as someone pointed out, IBM released the source for object-Rexx, so it may be possible to get it to run on the Zaurus.

In the mean time, I've found that Perl can do pretty much everything that Rexx did, and there is a version of Perl that runs on the Z -- it's what I use when I need to knock out a quick-and-dirty program or batch script.

rgzu · « **Reply #8 on:** December 03, 2004, 09:12:47 pm »

I use REXX/imc on a Solaris Server and used to program it on a mainframe many years ago. I guess REXX is one of the more obscure languages compared to the more well known PERL and Python, but it will be cool if it eventually does get compiled for the Zaurus.

RichS · « **Reply #9 on:** December 03, 2004, 09:53:28 pm »

In my searches for various rexx versions, I ran across this one:
http://ftp.debian.org/debian/pool/main/r/regina/
which shows:
regina-rexx_2.2-1_arm.deb

Regina being the other major rexx language and around a long time. Whether or not there is a version here that would run on the Z, I don't know? But maybe someone could get hold of the sources and compile one?

Tehas · « **Reply #10 on:** December 03, 2004, 10:46:06 pm »

And here's more on the REXX-Regina download page.
REXX-Regina on SourceForge

doseas · « **Reply #11 on:** December 04, 2004, 06:22:20 pm »

Quote

In my searches for various rexx versions, I ran across this one:
http://ftp.debian.org/debian/pool/main/r/regina/
which shows:
regina-rexx_2.2-1_arm.deb

Regina being the other major rexx language and around a long time. Whether or not there is a version here that would run on the Z, I don't know? But maybe someone could get hold of the sources and compile one?

Oh, yeah... I forgot about Regina -- I used to use it on a SparcStation a few jobs back. The debian-ARM package you pointed to (also requires regina2_2.2-1_arm.deb from the same location) _should_ work on the Zaurus. However, I get a Segmentation fault when I try to install it. In fact, I get a SegFault even just listing the contents: dpkg-deb -c regina-rexx_2.2-1_arm.deb gets only part way through. I wonder if the Debian project uses a newer version of dpkg than the one that comes in the Zaurus 3.x ROM.

If anyone has a cross-compiler toolchain handy (it will be a while before I can rebuild my Zaurus development workstation), you can grab the sources for these two packages from these URLs, about 3/4 of the way down the page:
http://packages.debian.org/stable/interpreters/regina-rexx
http://packages.debian.org/stable/libs/regina2

rgzu · « **Reply #12 on:** December 07, 2004, 10:51:25 pm »

I managed to get regina rexx working on my Zaurus! I have python, but I find it's syntax too c like for my taste. I could use it if I needed to too but I much prefer rexx. So being desperate I decided to see if I could get at the rexx interpreter inside the package and found that I was able to using the following syntax to extract the contents to a directory on my sd card:

dpkg-deb -x regina-rexx_2.2-1_arm.deb /mnt/card/rexx

and it just came up with these errors:

dpkg-deb: Cannot create symlink from
./usr/share/man/man1/regina.1.gz to
'rexx.1.gz': Operation not permitted

dpkg-deb: Cannot create symlink from
./usr/share/man/man1/rxstack.1.gz to
'../man7/undocumented.7.gz': Operation not permitted

dpkg-deb: Cannot create symlink from
./usr/share/man/man1/rxqueue.1.gz to
'../man7/undocumented.7.gz': Operation not permitted

but even so it managed to extract the following contents:

/mnt/card/rexx/usr
/mnt/card/rexx/usr/bin/regina
/mnt/card/rexx/usr/bin/rexx
/mnt/card/rexx/usr/bin/rxqueue
/mnt/card/rexx/usr/bin/rxstack
/mnt/card/rexx/usr/share/man/man1/rexx.1.gz
/mnt/card/rexx/usr/share/doc/regina-rexx/changelog.Debian.gz
/mnt/card/rexx/usr/share/doc/regina-rexx/copyright
/mnt/card/rexx/usr/share/doc/regina-rexx/examples/animal.rexx
/mnt/card/rexx/usr/share/doc/regina-rexx/examples/block.rexx
/mnt/card/rexx/usr/share/doc/regina-rexx/examples/dateconv.rexx
/mnt/card/rexx/usr/share/doc/regina-rexx/examples/dynfunc.rexx
/mnt/card/rexx/usr/share/doc/regina-rexx/examples/extqueue.rexx
/mnt/card/rexx/usr/share/doc/regina-rexx/examples/newstr.rexx
/mnt/card/rexx/usr/share/doc/regina-rexx/examples/rexxcps.rexx
/mnt/card/rexx/usr/share/doc/regina-rexx/examples/shell.rexx
/mnt/card/rexx/usr/share/doc/regina-rexx/examples/testeof.rexx
/mnt/card/rexx/usr/share/doc/regina-rexx/examples/timeconv.rexx

I just copied the contents of /mnt/card/rexx/usr/bin/ to my /usr/local/bin directory!

So far it seems to work fine.

I even used rexx with visiscript although you have to override one of the built in interpreters from the list by just entering rexx as the interpreter when you select one of the others.

rgzu · « **Reply #13 on:** December 09, 2004, 10:05:41 pm »

It seems that debian site also solved my problem of a basic interpreter for the Zaurus as well. The programs all seem to have a compiled version for the ARM cpu. I am assuming they are originally meant for ipaqs running linux?

I upacked a version of bywater basic and copied it to the appropriate directory in my path and it runs too. Not quite as versatile as REXX as you can't seem to use it in a script but still useful to knock up some quick programs nonetheless!

lareya · « **Reply #14 on:** December 09, 2004, 10:26:18 pm »

That bywater basic you have sounds cool, could you share with us how you did it? I am pretty much noob, but would love to try it out.

lareya

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Author Topic: Rexx Language (Read 5404 times)