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Wed, 24 Mar 2004
Rexx for Mac OS X
Anyone who's used OS/2 or IBM mainframes may recall Rexx, a simple yet powerful scripting language. You can now have it on Mac OS X.
Regina is an open source Rexx interpreter that has been ported to most Unix platforms. It's very easy to build on Mac OS X.
After downloading the source, unstuff it and go to that directory in the terminal. Type the following to build it:
./configure
make
That's all! Copy the resulting rexx binary to a directory in your search path (I put it in /usr/local/bin) and you're done. The demo directory contains a few demos you can use to test it.
It's very easy to use alternate scripting languages like Rexx. If you write a script in Rexx, just add '#!/usr/local/bin/rexx' (or wherever you installed it) as the first line, and you can run it the same way you run any shell script.
Example:
#!/usr/local/bin/rexx
say "hello from Rexx";
Experimental native Aqua version of AbiWord
AbiWord is a free open source MS Word compatible word procesor. Until now, it required X11 to run under Mac OS X.
An experimental native version is now available for Download. I found that it loads very quickly and was able to load a fairly complex Word document with no loss of formatting.