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ANSI Standard

The technical committee (formally known as the "Accredited Standards Committee X3J18, Information Processing Systems", or X3J18 for short) which developed the standard had this charter:

This project is for development of an American National Standard. The scope of the standard will be 'The REXX Language' described by Michael F Cowlishaw in his book, altered as necessary to promote portability, reliability, maintainability and efficient execution of REXX programs on a variety of computing systems.

The original notification of the formation of the X3J18 committee kindly provided by Mike Cowlishaw.

The 1996 American National Standard (ANSI Standard) for Rexx is called "Programming Language - REXX", and its number is X3.274-1996. The Standard can be ordered from the American National Standards Institute website. The cost is US$60 for a PDF version.

Here is the pre-publication approved final draft of the Standard.  This draft is functionally equivalent to the published Standard. Here is the list of official errata to the Standard as approved by X3J18.

Object Rexx Standard

Back in 1998 the J18 committee charged with developing Rexx standards did some work on an Object REXX draft specification. The key part of the new charter was:

The scope of the standard will be that of the existing standard plus consideration of extensions that have evolved in recent years. In particular the ability to work in an 'Object Oriented' way with both objects created by Rexx programs and objects not created by Rexx programs will be in the scope.

It is not expected that this will be turned into a Standard, and the committee is not working on the document.

The document could be of value to a few people with a technical/language interest who are not on the committee.  It is based on the existing Rexx standard but has extras, for examples, a conflict-checked Backus-Naur-Form syntax for Object REXX and semantic descriptions of the Collection class written in simpler Object REXX.

Additional Rexx Standard Information