Re: Rexx is 20 today

[mentifex@xxxxxxx (SCN User)]

Ah, 1979!  Our human rights hero, Jimmy Carter, was the U.S. President
and I was on a collision course with the REXX language, but I did not
know it.

On 1 January 1979 I looked around at my friends preparing to go marvel
at the frozen Green Lake here in Seattle WA USA, and I thought to myself
two things:  1)  They all think I'm crazy to spend my life on AI; and
2) they're right!  Because my AI project was totally stymied and halted.

But while Michael Cowlishaw was creating REXX, this Amiga ARexx user
was working out a linguistic theory of mind which will have its own
"Mentifex is 20 today" birthday on 8 May 1999 -- 20 years of a diagram.

>The Subject 'says it all'.
>
>Very many thanks to everyone who has used Rexx over the years for
>all the support, encouragement and feedback!
>
>Mike Cowlishaw
>
>- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
>IBM Fellow
>mailto:mfc@uk.ibm.com  --  http://www2.hursley.ibm.com

  /!i!i!i!i!i!\         ________                  /iiiiiiiiiii\
 /visual memory\       /        \                / auditory    \
|               |     /  syntax  \--------------|------------\  |
|               |     \   node   /    ______    |  memory    |  |
|               |      \________/----/      \   |  channel   |  |
|               |           |       /function\  |            |  |
|      /--------|--------\  |       \ cable  /  |            |  |
|      |        |        |  |        \______/   |    ____    |  |
|      |        |       _V__V_           |      |   /    \   |  |
|    __|__      |      /      \          |      |  /stored\  |  |
|   /image\     |     /logico- \---------|------|--\ stem /  |  |
|  /percept\----|----/conceptual\        |      |   \____/   |  |
|  \_______/    |    \ cable    /   _____V__    |     |      |  |
|               |     \________/   /        \---|-----'____  |  |
|               |                 /inflection\  |     /in- \ |  |
|               |                 \  cable   /--|----/flec- \|  |
|               |                  \________/   |    \tion  /   |
|               |                               |     \____/    |

http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Agora/7256/rexx.html is my REXX

page -- please add it to the various REXX hubs discussed recently.

A bit of background:  On Sat.26.Nov.1994 I released Amiga Mind.rexx
into the public domain as an AI program implementing the above-
diagrammed linguistic mind-model.

When I announced it in various comp.lang.* Usenet newsgroups,
there were only three major responses: two from Forth programmers,
and one from an IBM mainframe REXX programmer who tried valiantly
for several months to port my Amiga Mind.rexx program to REXX on
a mainframe.

Unfortunately, the Mind.rexx program was terribly flawed -- not
in its basic concepts (I hope!), but in the seductive easiness
of string-manipulation within REXX.

I have recently re-done Mind.rexx as Mind.forth, and Forth is so
demanding, so unforgiving, that I suddenly realized that I had
"cheated" my way all through Mind.rexx!  Whereas in Mind.forth
I properly treated AI engrams as single ASCII values resting
one at a time on the stack, in REXX I had sloppily concatenated
all my character strings and thus I had made the AI program far
too difficult to port to mainframe REXX, for lack of clarity.

Ah well, congratulations, Michael Cowlishaw, for your truly
wonderful programming language.  (I daresay that it shows itself
off to best advantage on the Commodore Amiga, where it makes
all the other applications into a symphony under the baton of REXX.)

Arthur T. Murray
independent AI scholar
mentifex@scn.org