So much here:

Notice in EE the use of [F3] to exit as in the original CUA. As I said at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50026580 .

Unix called it 'text' too. That's why the ETXTBUSY error's traditional message string is "Text file busy".

It's not losing the first character from FORMAT because of some magic line printer discard for the first character. It's losing the first character because you don't understand FORTRAN. FORMAT, as you can see in that example program, uses field descriptors to describe formats. It's losing the 'H' from 'HELLO' because that character means a 'Hollerith string' follows it, which in your case is the Mockney 'ELLO WORLD'. (-: You need an extra 'H', to start with.

In Unix terms, this is akin to the classic mistake of using printf() instead of puts() for your Hello program, and using a percent character in your string. In BASIC terms, this is PRINT USING, not PRINT. And yes, that does mean that technically you are holding it wrong. The text to write should be in the list given to WRITE, and FORMAT should just be specifying the field descriptor.

Only then do you get to the fact that the first column of formatted output specifies the number of printer lines to advance. So you are holding it doubly wrong. (-: There should be a space after the 'H' denoting your Hollerith string that precedes the 'H' of your 'Hello'. Notice that IBM's program has a space between the field descriptor "14H" (14 character Hollerith string) and "PROGRAM ERROR" (13 character string). That's not just random whitespace. It's the first character of the string, it means 1 line of vertical space, and the string is actually " PROGRAM ERROR".

You can get several native versions of REXX for Linux-based operating systems and the BSDs, including ObjectREXX and Regina.

* https://pkgsrc.se/lang/rexx-regina

* https://pkgsrc.se/lang/oorexx

* https://pkgsrc.se/lang/rexx-imc

It's 2026, and I just wrote about FORTRAN 66. Good heavens!

> It's 2026, and I just wrote about FORTRAN 66. Good heavens!

Thank you for the clarifications. I'll dig a little more and add that to the article. I learned Fortran 77 a long time ago, but I never used Fortran 66.