REXX Tips and Techniques

Personal REXX has been on the market since 1985 - over 10 years. In that time, we have handled thousands of calls on our support lines, and read tens of thousands of messages about REXX in various online discussion groups, such as CompuServe and Usenet.

Questions usually fall into one or two of a few categories, such as

Implementation bugs
Unexpected behavior of the REXX language
Requests for instructions on how to perform some task using REXX
Discussions of coding style
Performance tuning
Debugging techniques
Requests for sources of more information about REXX

Except for implementation bugs (which in Personal REXX we try to fix as soon as possible), the other sorts of questions appear over and over again. So, in the interest of saving everyone some time, we've tried to gather together some answers to the questions that arise most frequently.

These are the topics that are currently addressed:

Common REXX Pitfalls

How-to Questions and Answers for REXX in OS/2

More will be added as time goes on.

Of course, we have other information here which should also answer many questions that arise:

Solving REXX and OS/2 problems with REXXLIB

This is a discussion, with examples, of how to solve many common problems and get work done using the functions in our REXXLIB product.

Programming in REXX

And then, of course, there is our book. It has the answers to just about all questions use of the REXX language itself. If you are already comfortable with programming but need to learn REXX (or to learn it better), reading this book may be one of the most efficient ways to proceed.

Paper on advanced REXX programming

This paper deals with two interrelated topics: how to work with data structures in REXX (arrays, lists, tables, etc.) and how to organize a REXX application of an appreciable size (more than a few hundreds of lines of code).

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Last updated: September 20, 1995