RxEnv
Tools for your ARexx development environment
Background
Coding in ARexx on the Amiga can be great fun. It's a quirky little language by modern standards, nevertheless I find it to be a highly enjoyable experience. Still, ARexx was born in 1987, and it lacks many of the comforts we take for granted when working with younger scripting languages.
I've always felt that it's suffered greatly from the inability to include other scripts, allowing the programmer to build a small library of functions that can complement the built-ins. I also frequently miss a Read, Eval, Print Loop.
The best way to remedy this is of course to solve the problem yourself. The development process is described in greater detail here.
The ARexx REPL
The REPL supports multi-line statements (so called "buffers"), will automatically print the result of any single statement returning a value and traps errors without touching the current variable scope. The REPL itself is written in ARexx and should run on any Amiga capable of running ARexx.
Example REPL session.
The ARexx Preprocessor
The ARexx preprocessor rxpp allows the inclusion of
ARexx "modules" - include files with native ARexx functions - into other
ARexx scripts.
It doesn't do much more at present, but ARexx includes is what I've
been missing for a long time, so I'm pleased. The preprocessor
is written in C (mostly ANSI but slightly Amiga-ized)
and requires AmigaOS 2.0 or higher.
Example rxpp session.
Downloads
RxEnv can be downloaded as an LhA archive below. The latest version is 1.2. RxEnv is released under the GPL 3.0 license.
- RxEnv12.lha, ~37 k LhA archive.
- Take a peek at the source code for the REPL.