Or do they already have but it's proprietary and only used for
REXX, ObjectREXX, and NetRexx are IBM languages, the work of one
engineer, Mike Cowlishaw. On IBM systems, REXX supplanted all of the
prior scripting and control languages, because it's simple, incredibly
expressive, and easy to embed in other applications and environments.
REXX has never really spread outside of IBM systems (except on Amiga,
oddly enough), but it's worth learning; Java programmers should probably
start with NetRexx, because it uses the familiar Java libraries, while
OREXX is more suitable for writing standalone apps that work with native
libraries.
IBM has produced and worked in a number of other languages over the
years. A lot of code is written in COBOL, Ada, and RPG, probably more
lines of code than Java, C, and C++ combined, and certainly more money
goes through that code.
This stuff isn't for "rocket science" (FORTRAN is still the dominant
language of rocket science, and very little rocket science is done on
IBM systems). It's for business environments most people are not too
familiar with; the millions of developers who write apps on these "toy
home computers" (from the perspective of enterprise development) usually
don't have much contact with the few tens of thousands of developers who
work in the big-iron business environments.
--
<a href="
http://kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu/~kamikaze/"> Mark Hughes </a>
"Punch, he kills and looks to me... I cannot help you, Punch; you are
half-crazed." "No, no, no, Punch is fully crazed. He is a sociopath. He can
do anything because he feels nothing. Mr. Punch is a winner." -Colin