IBM Object REXX

IBM Object REXX is an object-oriented programming language suited for beginners as well as experienced OO programmers.

It was originally released in versions for OS/2 and AIX that offered integration with SOM 2.1 and had some limited graphic functionality, but IBM later made versions available for Microsoft Windows and Sun Solaris that were fully independent of SOM, note that unlike the OS/2 version the AIX and Windows versions were all paid separate commercial products. Sun Solaris (SPARC) and Linux versions were available as-is.

History
When IBM decided in 1988 to standardise on Smalltalk as their language of choice for future application development it became obvious that it would be beneficial if other tools from the company could offer a degree of compatibility with the object model that Smalltalk offered. This lead to amongst other things the development of the CORBA derived System Object Model and the closely related Distributed System Object Model (DSOM) but it also became obvious that it would be better if REXX, which was heavily used in IBM systems as a glue language, could operate with the object-oriented paradigm as well, this alongside a general interest in O-O languages at the time lead Simon C. Nash (IBM UK) later in 1998 to start experimenting with merging the REXX language with the object model of Smalltalk under the code name Oryx.

IBM showed the first prototype of the Object REXX language at the 1992 REXX Symposium on an OS/2 2.0 machine. In 1993 the language had gained graphical user interface class libraries for both OS/2 Presentation Manager and OSF/Motif on AIX, a development environment that includes a class browser, an interactive debugger and object inspector, and integrated support for OS/2 WPS object via SOM.

In 1994 IBM announced that development the Object REXX would replace Classic REXX as the default REXX interpreter in the next release of OS/2. The development was now in the hands of a team run by Rick McGuire. At the same time the company announced a few extensions to the language in addition to the O-O features already included but amongst new language features were expressions in stems, parse enhancements, Countstr and Changestr functions, extended Do and date conversion.

Products

 * IBM Object REXX for OS/2 PPC (1996) included with OS/2 Warp PowerPC Edition
 * IBM Object REXX for OS/2 (1996) included with OS/2 Warp 4
 * IBM Object REXX for AIX
 * IBM Object REXX for Windows
 * Object REXX Interpreter Edition (1996)
 * Object REXX Development Edition (Summer 1997)
 * Object REXX plus IBM Object REXX Workbench (GUI development & debugging) and sundry tools like tokenisers & linkers etc.


 * Object REXX for SUN/Solaris
 * Object REXX for Linux

Links

 * IBM press release of the Open sourcing of Object REXX (2004-11-29)