Category talk:OoRexx: Difference between revisions
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: As I understood LEXX (changed, see :: comment below), it was designed for use on the IBM 3279 terminal (which supported color, and most 3279s also supported graphics), but it also supported multiple fonts. It was this multiple font that made it possible to show (among other characters) the schwa and other upside-down characters, bold and/or italic characters, digraph characters, accented characters, and the like. If anybody ever scrolled though a good/huge (printed) dictionary, there was a large use of such symbols, and it made sense to show the those same symbols (glyphs) on a terminal screen for the people maintaining that dictionary. It was the only IBM terminal (that I knew of) at that time which could represent those special characters. [There must have been other special terminals that could support those functions.] Color was there on the 3279 terminal, so it was taken advantage of. That it used color doesn't make it objective evidence of the advantages of color. That is displayed what the printed dictionary contained was of paramount importance. If color was that important, the dictionary could've been printed in color. I remember a company that I worked for which got a slough (ok, a mere truckload of 64) of IBM (color) 3279 terminals (free! --- did I mention free?) with a highlighting editor, and almost all the programmers didn't use the highlighting --- (most said it was too distracting from editing the source code they already knew). I believe the test study was limited to just programmers. But the color was nice in XEDIT as it allowed users to specify what colors to use for various parts of the screen (of a file being edited) such as the current line, tab line, excluded line(s), ID line, command line, prefix area, the data area (the source code or whatever was being edited), the MSGline(s) [which normally displayed the error or warning messages], and other such areas. XEDIT didn't force the coloring on the user, it was a choice. And having a truckload of free terminals was good business for the company, and a glowing report was giving to IBM how great color was, and then we got the terminals for keeps. This was no small amount of coin here. A most thoroughly unbiased opinion if I ever heard one. If somebody give me a state-of-the-art $2200 terminal today (for free!) --- that what was the price of a terminal in ''those'' days if you bought it, I'd probably be tempted to say that italized comments are the cat's pajamas, the bee's knees (--- and then wouldn't use it). But fortunately, I already have three of those, so I can complain about the italized uglyness. I wish the highlighting would highlight '''syntax''', not keywords, literals, comments, etc. I also wish for world peace, and a bigger, er ..., terminal. -- [[User:Gerard Schildberger|Gerard Schildberger]] 20:39, 24 June 2012 (UTC)
: I fondly remember the 3279. It was LEXX, not LPEX, that was designed for those. LPEX was a PC product that had its inspiration from LEXX. By the time, free 3279 terminals could not influence the decision to like it.--[[User:rvjansen|Rene Jansen]] 15:21,
:: Thanks for the correction. I changed my reference from LPEX to LEXX. I know nothing of LPEX, I only reported on my exposure to LEXX in the early 1980s. What (or how) are the decendants of LEXX & LPEX doing today? I just looked at examples of LPEX and it appears to be a bit involved and requires some investment to learn. -- [[User:Gerard Schildberger|Gerard Schildberger]] 17:08, 25 June 2012 (UTC)
:::I have been told that a Java version of LPEX made its way into the Visual Age products, and a descendant of that is now to be found in Eclipse as the Eclipse editor. As I was not involved in any of this, it would be nice to find out for sure. I am using Emacs since losing X2 with the demise of OS/2 - although I have it back running on eComstation. To be honest - I never switch on syntax coloring in ISPF, which is the only environment where I find it to be distracting; it was also introduced around the time that I stopped doing mainframe work exclusively, so I never got used to it. The 3270 fonts and colours have some peculiar connotations, like green for edit and cyan for browse - this also made me to wage wars on pc departments that forced emulators on us with the wrong shade of cyan. But for general Unix/Wintel/Mac work, there is no question that the colouring helps. I even like Bill Finlason's Eclipse editor for NetRexx - he has got the right colouring scheme out of the box. [[User:Rvjansen|rvjansen]]
As mentioned, while editing code, there is no colouring on Rosetta, so there cannot be distraction from that. Editing code for examples should be in each author's personal environment anyway. Syntax colouring increases the status of a language - it is a fact that the wider known/used languages have colouring, the lesser known/used have not. This argument extends to PL/I which influenced Rexx and also deserves the same treatment - it seems unjustly devaluated by being shown in plain black-on-white.
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