🚀 go-pugleaf

Enough. The following two false statements have been made, and need to
be corrected.

1) "ARexx is a mini PL/I". Not anymore than TCL is "a mini shell".
The two have some syntactic relationship to the "more complete"
language; that's about where the similarity to it's parent language
ends. Both have roots in other languages as well, and both look like
they can do the job intended for them pretty weel.

2) "ARexx requires the programmer to provide a scripting language."
A half-truth, at best. ARexx requires a command line interpreter,
which is a much less complicated beast. For example, treewalk makes
quite effective use of an ARexx interface. It's got no scripting
language whatsoever - all it knows how to do is parse expressions.

And we have a false implication.

3) "TCL does all the parsing, handles loops, etc", with the
implication that ARexx doesn't do any of this. Again, 1/2 true. ARexx
provides loops, variables, and all the hard part of the scripting
language. You do have to provide a command parser. There are
advantages & disadvantages to both approaches.

The Usenix article is inadequate for doing a real comparison. I'm
getting a copy to look at, and may have more to say later. However, I
suspect that it'll have much the same problem Rexx does - most tcl
programs are dependent on the application they talk to, and won't port
very well because of this (unless the application runs in both
places). 

Rexx is powerful enough that people are writing "real" (as opposed to
macro for them) applications in it, so there is interest in ports to
other places (the call for a Unix Rexx on comp.lang.rexx is a monthly
event). I don't know if this is true for tcl or not, but time will
tell us that one.

	<mike

--
My feet are set for dancing,				Mike Meyer
Won't you turn your music on.				mwm@berkeley.edu
My heart is like a loaded gun,				ucbvax!mwm
Won't you let the water run.				mwm@ucbjade.BITNET