..even for money. After the REXX experience I loved it. After the Perl experience I wanted to tear my eyes from their sockets and run isopropyl alcohol over them and massage them back to life.

REXX always seemed to me to express the coder. Sloppy coders would produce sloppy REXX (because you can!) Neat ones wrote for readability.

REXX was also very easy to use with external libraries. It was very simple to call things in OS/2 DLLs for example. Also on 'frames, the interface to the system routines was very simple (at least so it seemed to me, coming from DCL - but I always seemed to get the IBM mindset).

Everyone says Perl's regexp engine is just the bomb, but how often is all that needed? Of course REXX on UNIX can always call an external regexp parser if needed. On the other hand the lexical pasting that is so REXXy is extremely useful all the time. Also, "parse" seems to me to be better for getting "real things" off a text string - not in the abstract but say for parsing a syslog from a 'frame. Regexps tend to piss me off anyway.

In short I liked REXX a lot more than I liked Perl as an "intermediate" language ( > shell, < C ). I personally could never get past the unreadability of Perl due to the prefix operators, a horrible flaw. People say APL is unreadable - it's a children's book next to Perl. No offense to Ben, but Perl also seems to encourage "tricksterism" - this may be good among fulltime Perlers who write most of their own stuff, but for people who have to read other people's code it sucks. In addition to REXX and Perl, I've done DCL and of course UNIX shell. I would not complain if REXX were the default scripting langauge for everything.

Barry says only Perl can handle his volume. I doubt this, but he'll have to explain it himself.