GitHub - mvslovers/brexx370: MVS version of Vasilis Vlachoudis awesome rexx implementation (original) (raw)

BRexx370

System/370 (MVS) version of the ingenious BRexx interpreter originally by Vasilis N. Vlachoudis.

Currently released version is V2R5M0

What is REXX?

REXX is a programming language designed by Michael Cowlishaw of IBM UK Laboratories. In his own words: "REXX is a procedural language that allows programs and algorithms to be written in a clear and structured way."

Syntactically, REXX doesn't look that different from any other procedural language. Here's a simple REXX program:

/* Count some numbers */

say "Counting..." do i = 1 to 10 say "Number" i end

Background

BRexx is an open source version of the classic Rexx developed by Vasilis Vlachoudis of the Cern Laboratory in Switzerland. Written as an ANSI C language program, BRexx is notable for its high performance. It also provides a nice collection of special built-in functions and function libraries that offer many extra features over most of the existing Classic Rexx implementations.

BRexx was originally written for DOS in the late eighties/early 1990s. Then,with the rise of Windows, it was revised for the 32-bit world of Windows and 32-bit DOS. BRexx also runs under the Linux and Unix family of operating systems, and has a good set of functions especially written for Windows CE. Other operating systems on which it runs include: MacOS, BeOS, and the Amiga OS.

One of the outstanding features, among so many, of BRexx is its minuscule footprint. The entire product, written in C, including full documentation and examples, takes up only a measly few hundred kilobytes. It is small enough to fit on a single, ol' school floppy diskette!

Hence, BRexx was prime for re-targeting to MVS/VM for TSO/CMS. And so it was. Recently, the BRexx Rexx Interpreter was made operational onto the MVS 3.8j platform as BRexx/370 version V2R1M0 and it was released in April of 2019.
The MVS 3.8j (now emulated) mainframe platform which pre-dates IBM's official release of TSO/CMS Rexx published initially, in the next (i.e. XA) set of offerings of IBM mainframe OSes. However, the lack of having a Rexx significantly hampers the MVS 3.8j platform of not only the highly utilitarian features of Rexx as the powerful glue it provides as an operating system's command/macro language, tying all of the vast collection of system resources together programmatically, under one umbrella, but also prevents the users and the MVS 3.8j community from taking advantage of the treasure trove of Rexx-ware scripts/programs/applications that exists currently which greatly enhances the MVS 3.8j user's and MVS 3.8j community's mainframe computing experience, many-fold.

BRexx was made operational, as BRexx/370, targeting the MVS 3.8j platform by: Peter Jacob (PEJ) and Mike Groβmann (MIG). BRexx/370 now provides a Rexx scripting/command language for the MVS 3.8j platform.

Download

Full releases with install instructions are available here: https://github.com/mvslovers/brexx370/releases

Installation

Instalation Instructions can be found at BREXX/370 Installation Instructions

Documentation

Full documentation is available at BREXX/370 Documentation

Building From Source

To build BREXX/370 from source please rever to the README in the build directory.

Community

For questions and suggestions you can find us at: Moshix Discord Channel

Please also read the original README.