Comment stale glue (Score 1) 330
REXX seems historically interesting but little in the article makes it clear why one ought to care about it today.
The first example is telling - munge a file and do something depending on the content of each line. This has been such a common problem for so many years that the number of very capable solutions exceeds the number of lines in the file it is often applied to. The usual suspects of unix command line utilities (easily available or shipping with many platforms in common use) handle 80% of this stuff with a command or two. For the rest, the entire battery of sed, awk, shell, perl, python, ruby, etc is available and easily applicable. For most basic file and text processing problems, you can just google for a solution and you'd probably have to constrain your search to your favourite tool or language in order not to be overwhelmed by the multitude of solutions.
The fact is, basic text processing and data sctructures beyond a simple integer indexed array (imagine that, a hash table keyed with strings!) are so deeply ingrained in most popular 'glue' languages that demonstrations of a particular tool's proficiency at such things seems quaint.
A less dated way to put a scripting language through its paces might be something like logging into a website, tracking the cookied session, navigating to some location without a stable URL (say, dependent on form posts) and parsing out some piece of data from the resulting page. Simple things in a few lines of perl or python. What about REXX?
-pvg
The first example is telling - munge a file and do something depending on the content of each line. This has been such a common problem for so many years that the number of very capable solutions exceeds the number of lines in the file it is often applied to. The usual suspects of unix command line utilities (easily available or shipping with many platforms in common use) handle 80% of this stuff with a command or two. For the rest, the entire battery of sed, awk, shell, perl, python, ruby, etc is available and easily applicable. For most basic file and text processing problems, you can just google for a solution and you'd probably have to constrain your search to your favourite tool or language in order not to be overwhelmed by the multitude of solutions.
The fact is, basic text processing and data sctructures beyond a simple integer indexed array (imagine that, a hash table keyed with strings!) are so deeply ingrained in most popular 'glue' languages that demonstrations of a particular tool's proficiency at such things seems quaint.
A less dated way to put a scripting language through its paces might be something like logging into a website, tracking the cookied session, navigating to some location without a stable URL (say, dependent on form posts) and parsing out some piece of data from the resulting page. Simple things in a few lines of perl or python. What about REXX?
-pvg
