7.1. Background and history In the various definitions of REXX, there are numerous references to the “stack” (often called the “external data queue”, or just the “queue”). It is a structure capable of storing information, but it is not a part of the REXX language itself. Rather, it is a part of the external environment supporting a REXX implementation. Originally, the references to the stack was introduced into REXX because of the strong binding between REXX and IBM mainframes in the early history of REXX [BMARKS]. Most (all?) of the operating systems for these machines support a stack, and many of their script programming idioms involve the stack. Therefore, it was quite natural to introduce an interface to the stack into REXX, and consequently today many of the programming paradigms of REXX involve a stack. Unfortunately, this introduced an element of incompatibility into REXX, as the stack is not in general supported for other operating systems. Consequently, REXX implementors often must implement a stack as well of the core REXX interpreter. Since no authoritative definition of the stack exists, considerable differences between various implementations. Ironically, although the stack was introduced to help communication between separate programs, the interpreter-specific implementations of stacks may actually be a hindrance against compatibility between different interpreters. The stack may have “seemed like a good idea at the time”, but in hindsight, it was probably a bad move, since it made REXX more dependent on the host operating system and its interfaces.
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