Does Rexx take long to learn?
I was half considering scouting around for a new scripting language, having an aversion to bourne shell for scripts longer than a few lines. Perl's fine or more than fine for a lot of things, of course, but unless I'm missing something, when you want to run Unix commands you have to make a call to system, which isn't much improvement over C in terms of brevity. Okay, when you're taking in the output of a command you have backticks and the open function, but sometimes you simply want to run a program and let it use stdout, stderr, and stdin rather than redirect them.
I like scsh for this, and like lisp, but it's barely maintained. I think there's not even really a solid amd64 build yet. I noticed a paper about something called Shcaml, based on ML, but though the idea of bringing static typing to shell scripting is appealing, unless I mistook the syntax, the notation for running a command isn't brief like /bin/sh or scsh, but inelegantly has you precede each one with command, giving the same notation problem (I think) Perl has.
Maybe Rexx would fit the bill.
Otherwise, has anyone tried plan 9's rc as a substitute to bourne, anyone who finds notations like 1>&2 or ${what%%the} squirrely?
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