The thinker Rexx interface - grown, not designed

See evaluations for the evaluation criteria.

See thinker for a description of thinker.

Moderately well defined

Though many commands are well-defined, there are some noticable holes regarding either the environment the command runs in, or the results in extraordinary situations.

Not complete - features missing from the application and Intuition.

There are a large number of things a user sitting at the keyboard can do that an ARexx macro can't do. For example, there's no way to directly manipulate the structure of a thinker document, other than cutting and adding statements. The print command can't be accessed. There's no access to Intution at all.

Moderately consistent with ARexx and itself

The commands look like ARexx commands. The textual data doesn't look like Rexx strings. The return codes provide lots of information, and strings are returned via result. No use is made of the RVI, which is a shame, as they would be very usefull with this application.

Reasonably readable

The commands are words, with modifiers that are also words. The data follows on the rest of the line, and is interpreted usually without quoting of any kind. This makes reading, writing and debugging the commands very straightforward.


On to the treewalk evaluation, back to the MFF+ evaluation, or up to evalutions.

Mike W. Meyer