The AmigaVision Rexx interface - Why bother?

See evaluations for the evaluation criteria.

I have been informed that AmigaVision actually had a very complete AREXX interface, but the publisher of the AmigaVision manual left those pages out. In light of that, this evalution should be considered to be for the documented interface, not the actual interface. Should you have these "lost" documents, I'd be more than happy to host them at mired.org.

Well defined

The command - all three of them - are reasonably well defined. Then again, there's almost nothing to define.

"Nonexistent" is more accurate than "Incomplete"

The ARexx interface does not exist in the application proper, but only in the presentations built with it. It cannot be used either as a macro language, or for building scripts for use with Amigavision. It's sole purpose is to provide communicate with applications run from a presentation. And it allows that script access to almost none of the power of AmigaVision - the flow of the presentation can't be controlled; the imagery on the AmigaVision sceen can't be changed, music can't be played, animations can't be run - even though AmigaVision supports all this!

Mostly consistent with ARexx, nonexistent in the application

The three commands look like ARexx commands. Text strings are returned to the script in Result. However, strings being passed to AmigaVision aren't quoted, which is not consistent with ARexx.

Mostly readable

The commands are mostly readable, for the same reason a childs book is readable - there's almost nothing there to confuse the issue. However, the lack of quoting on the setvar command could cause some confusion, and makes it difficult to set variables to strings with leading or trailing spaces.


On to the LSE evaluation, or up to evaluations.

Mike W. Meyer