by Howard Fosdick
Hey, the Mac’s got a lot of cachet. The lack of viruses… the excellent user interface… the unique apps. It’s the original anti-monopoly platform.
Whatever the reasons you love your Mac, you can use Rexx too.
There are several free Rexx interpreters for the Mac. Among them are Regina, Rexx/imc, and BRexx. All three are standard Rexx interpreters that offer a lot of value. Which you should use depends on your project and your needs. Get product information or download the products through www.RexxInfo.org.
My own Mac knowledge of Rexx is limited to Regina, so here are instructions for two different ways to install Regina on your MacIntosh. These instructions are for Mac OS X. (You can run Rexx on older Mac OS Classic 7.9 – 9.0, but that’s a subject for another column).
1. Install Approach #1 – use a StuffIt file
Download the Regina Rexx StuffIt file from here. The StuffIt file is the one with the .sit extension containing a dmg file. Mount the Regina folder on your desktop, then do a standard Mac application install.
2.
Install Approach #2 – build from source code
Download the Regina Rexx source from here. This is a file with the extension of .tar.gz. Uncompress the file into a new Regina folder, and go to that directory in the terminal. Enter these two commands to build a binary executable from the source—
./configure
make
Put the resulting binary in a proper location in your search path, for example, /usr/local/bin.
Regina comes with a number of test programs in its demo folder you can use to test your install. A perennial favorite is the rexxcps program. This script measures how many Rexx clauses per second your machine executes. Just for fun, compare your results to those posted here.
You can also enter a simple test program—
#!/usr/local/bin
say “Rexx
says Hello!”
The first line tells the operating system the location of the Rexx binary.
To enable Regina to load external function packages, you need to download and install the "dlcompat" package. Read those instructions here, or find them in the Regina documentation.
Having Rexx on the Mac is pretty handy. If you know Rexx from the mainframe, the IBM iSeries or some other platform, now you can have the same language on your MacIntosh. I run into a lot of people who remember Rexx from when they used OS/2 or the AmigaOS, and they’re always glad to hear it’s available on their current system.
Why spend time learning yet another platform-specific or specialized language when a standard one like Rexx provides what you need?