Rexx Programmer's Reference

Chapter 23. Reginald

Overview

Reginald Rexx was developed by Jeff Glatt of the United States. He took the Regina interpreter and heavily modified it to customize it, and added features especially oriented to the Windows operating system. The result is a well-documented product with features and tools that leverage Windows. Reginald supplies all the Windows-oriented "power tools" and functions Windows programmers expect. Reginald is a free product that provides an alternative to proprietary languages like Microsoft's Visual Basic and VBScript for Windows programming. Unlike Microsoft's Windows-only technologies, Reginald represents Rexx, a standards-based, free, and open-source language that runs across all operating systems and platforms.

This chapter provides an overview of the extended features and strengths of Reginald. The latter half of the chapter offers several sample scripts that illustrate some of these features. We'll start by listing and discussing some of the advantages of Reginald as a Rexx interpreter. After describing how to install the product, we discuss the extended functions of Reginald, how it supports Windows GUI programming, its advanced I/O features, and its other extended features and functions.

We present several sample scripts. The first illustrates functions for Windows device, file, and drive management. Two other short scripts show how to write Windows GUIs with Reginald. Another demonstrates speech synthesis, while the final script shows how to update ...