Rexx Programmer's Reference

Chapter 22. BRexx

Overview

BRexx is a free version of 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.

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

An outstanding feature of BRexx is its tiny footprint. The entire product, including full documentation and examples, comprises only a few hundred kilobytes. This is small enough to fit on a single floppy diskette. Installation is simple. Just download a file, decompress it, set an environmental variable, and voila! BRexx is ready to go.

This chapter describes BRexx's extended features and offers several sample programs. Specifically, we'll review the strengths of the product and how to download and install it under several common operating systems. Then we'll discuss some of its special features that extend beyond the Rexx standards. These include extra built-in functions, such as those for manipulating the stack, system information and control, higher mathematics, C-language style input/output, and MySQL ...