Hi, On Sat, Oct 24, 2020 at 4:21 PM Steve Nickolas <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Sat, 24 Oct 2020, Eric Auer wrote: > > > Regina REXX was not very small, while some others are small? > > Regina at least has some justification. Some later versions of PC DOS > came with REXX.
Yeah, it replaced QBASIC there. REXX is a very cool language (ANSI standard, too, in 1996). TRL2 (1990) was version "4.00" while ANSI was "5.00" and the newer (non-standard) OOP variant ooREXX is version "6.00" (can be detected at runtime and your source can branch accordingly). It's garbage collected, no reserved words, an "easier PL/I", meant even for non-professional programmers, with few arcane symbolic "line noise" needed. No dangling pointers nor manual memory management needed just to use linked lists! (Howard Fosdick gives away his REXX book [PDF] for free on his website.) It's roughly the same capabilities as *nix/POSIX AWK (which is also quite useful and has some good DOS ports). I don't know if ooREXX will build with DJGPP. Probably not, but I haven't checked lately. IIRC, it required C++ and Pthreads. But maybe DJGPP's FSU Pthreads (like in p7zip) would let it "mostly" work?? Honestly, I don't grok any of the Smalltalk-esque OOP stuff (but the newsgroup users always seemed to love and prefer it). Our Regina build (ANSI only, no OOP) is mine from 2012 using DJGPP. Later sources had bugs that I never dug into that made it refuse to build. You could maybe argue that even rebuilding 3.7 with DJGPP 2.05 (or newer, more powerful GCC) might bring some benefit. Dunno. But he did (barely) update 3.93 last year (after several years of inactivity). I haven't checked lately to see if I could rebuild it. I probably need to do that (since, indeed, I started getting back into it a little bit). Just FYI, in case anybody is curious. (No, I never used PC-DOS, but I'm sure it's good ... but not as good as FreeDOS!) _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
