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From: peter@sugar.UUCP (Peter da Silva)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: AREXX and ICP
Message-ID: <873@sugar.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 11-Oct-87 20:51:00 EDT
Article-I.D.: sugar.873
Posted: Sun Oct 11 20:51:00 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 15-Oct-87 04:10:36 EDT
References: <11774@decwrl.DEC.COM>
Organization: Sugar Land UNIX - Houston, TX
Lines: 28

OK, so maybe REXX is an exception to the VM/CMS==huge and slow rule. And
I'll admit I shouldn't be knocking new programming languages (new to the
Amiga, anyway).

But why implement it in such a weird way? If you want to take advantage of
REXX (and I might be wrong about this... it's been known to happen) you have
to handle a thing called a REXX port... presumably another message port...
in your program. And when you do, you can't use it to take advantage of any
other filters than REXX.

Making it a device that can be addressed through AmigaDOS (as some have
suggested) would be an improvement. Better still would be to make it
possible for other filters to be plugged in. Now, most any program you
want to use as a filter is going to have the ability to read from Input()
and write to Output() (except for REXX, apparently).

Programs like awk and sed that have proven useful over the years. Newcomers
like icon. Quicky programs that even novice programmers can turn out
quickly in whatever language they like to do strange and bizzarre things
to data. 

Before going off in a new direction, how about looking at an environment
that has been using filters with great success for many years...

...instead of setting up another clipboard. Look how useful that's been.
-- 
-- Peter da Silva  `-_-'  ...!hoptoad!academ!uhnix1!sugar!peter
-- Disclaimer: These U aren't mere opinions... these are *values*.