Category talk:OoRexx

Plagiarism

In that the code presented herein is covered by the GNU Free Documentation Licence 1.2, I'm not convinced that anything developed or reimplemented from an example in another language can be or should be identified as "plagiarized", particularly if the appropriate acknowledgements are in place. (Rosetta Code even provides the means witihin the editor to indicate that a program is a direct translation of some other work via the {{trans|XXXX}} template. [see Template:Trans]) Plagiarism can be a very emotive word and a serious charge to level at someone, particularly when related to software development; we should avoid describing work presented here as such.

Remember that by contributing programs to Rosetta Code you are "promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a public domain or similar free resource" [sic.] --Alansam

Pls advise at a better (acceptable) wording! I did to the best of my knowledge. --Walterpachl 08:30, 9 June 2012 (UTC)

Hi Walterpachl; You should say that the second was an adaptation of the first example that works on the IBM ...

In general, the two paragraphs should be changed so that there is no need for the correction mentioned at the beginning of the second paragraph, just remove the wrong info on compatibility between Rexx and ooRexx. --Paddy3118 08:54, 9 June 2012 (UTC)

thanks. changed. --Walterpachl

Coloring / Highlighting Rexx code

I asked for adding GeShi highlighting for Rexx (and ooRexx) code. This is now in place. Thanks are in order to Jon Wolfers who created the php some years ago. Please state whether you like it, hate it, want it removed, want it changed. Always trying and sometimes achieving something --Walterpachl

You may want to put a pointer in the category for REXX as well as this poll involves that language, more so than ooREXX as there are many more REXX entries than ooREXX. -- Gerard Schildberger 16:44, 9 June 2012 (UTC)

I vote NO, strongly and emphatically, for the use of the PHP for REXX. For REXX code, particularly with code that contains a significant amount of comments, I find the italicization almost dreadful to read. When I read (other's) REXX code, my eyes drift to the comments (especially if they are robust and plentiful) to get an overview of the program (which is especially important when I don't have a nary clue what that program is doing), and the italics really really make that difficult. I can't be the only older programmer that fading eyesight is becoming a problem. As for the highlighting, it too is distracting, and well, detracts from the readability and flow of the code. On the other hand, highlighting is nice for "strange" languages where I don't know what are keywords and what are variables, etc. When a language is more natural (to read), highlighting just gets in the way. I (try to) read a lot of other code, especially tasks that are very hard to understand, and some tasks (and many golf solutions/examples) are downright obtuse, so I spend a lot of my purusing time trying to read other languages solutions and I find that the ones with minimal highlighting much easier to scan/read. However, for the golf cases, for some strange reason, the comments are of the null variety, but that's another story. [We could start a whole new thread on the dearth of comments, and if ever there was a place for a huge amount of comments, Rosetta Code would be the place.] To me, it almost looks like someone got a new box of crayons and went ka-razy, thinking that the more colors, the better it looks. Nothing could be further from the truth. It would be nice if the hypertext preprocessor could be disabled by the user (trying) to read the source text. I don't mind it so much for my own code, as I just ignore the PHP version on Rosetta Code and edit a copy of the source code locally, which really shouldn't have to be the case, as the PHP is supposed to make reading the code easier, but instead it gets in the way. Walter Pachl (above) had an idea to possible use «lang crexx» for the coloring, and «lang rexx» for "normal" viewing. (I used the those "funny" double left and right carots 'cause I forgot how to write escape characters for the left and right carots.) I beg your indulgence concerning the length of this entry as I'm trying to explain my rather intense feelings about this PHP. -- Gerard Schildberger 16:44, 9 June 2012 (UTC)

I vote YES, also strongly and emphatically, for syntax highlighting. I disagree with almost every point Gerard makes; I've always found that highlighting keywords makes it easier to follow the logic flow particularly when strange indentation styles have been adopted. I'd also like NetRexx included in the deployment if possible. (It's syntax is so Rexx-like I can't see it being much of a stretch.) P.S. There may be a better way, but inserting "angle brackets" (< and >) in the text can be done with the HTML tags "&lt;" and "&gt;". --Alansam 19:50, 9 June 2012 (UTC)

I also vote YES, although I find the italicisation a bit weird. It seems to be the mandatory style for comments on GeSHi.