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Anikom15

Banned

From: United States

Registered: 2009-04-30

Posts: 836

Website

Freaking weird programming language (Tcl)

Does anyone here use tcl? I was reading a tutorial (http://www.tcl.tk/man/tcl/tutorial/tcltutorial.html) and I have to say this is certainly the strangest non-esoteric language I've seen. Besides being Tk's parent does it have anything special?

UPDATE: It's fun to play with. It's growing on me, maybe I'll start to like it.

Last edited by Anikom15 (2010-02-28 17:38:56)

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Personally, I'd rather be back in Hobbiton.

sr

Member

Registered: 2009-10-12

Posts: 51

Re: Freaking weird programming language (Tcl)

Quite a few engineering apps use Tcl as their scripting language. It's not too bad, once you understand the evaluation model. Oh, and you may want to take a look at expect/expectk sometime

Leffe

Member

Registered: 2006-05-30

Posts: 47

Re: Freaking weird programming language (Tcl)

I recently relearned Tcl to write a little app with Tk. Perhaps it will become one of my regular languages, but there aren't many problems where C, Haskell, or zsh wouldn't work just as well.

MikeT

Member

From: Coventry, UK

Registered: 2010-01-20

Posts: 37

Website

Re: Freaking weird programming language (Tcl)

Last time I used tcl was a very long time ago (prob about 10 years or so) for an eggdrop script!

sr

Member

Registered: 2009-10-12

Posts: 51

Re: Freaking weird programming language (Tcl)

That's probably true: tcl shines when you need to make a lightweight prompt and give users the ability to use code that's otherwise written in C. Lua is the modern alternative to this, but it has it's own wrinkles (nothing wrong with it, it's just different). Using shell script to do this would make things difficult to maintain in the long run, and I don't even want to think about how I'd do it in Haskell

coreyography

Member

Registered: 2009-06-11

Posts: 7

Re: Freaking weird programming language (Tcl)

Yep.

Wide portability, stable codebase, decent libraries, simple syntax (though a bit different until you get used to it -- described as "Lisp without the parens"), good stability, simple event-driven programming, built-in GUI library (Tk), tightly-linked lightweight SQL database (sqlite), easy app deployment (tclkit/starkits/starpacks)

Also a friendly and helpful community at http://wiki.tcl.tk, news://comp.lang.tcl and the Tcl Chatroom.

I'm using it to write cross-platform apps that run on XP and a couple different Solaris versions.  And they also run on my Linux and Windows 7 boxes at home.  All from a single script codebase.

Tcl is one of the older scripting languages, and doesn't get the press that Ruby, Python, Haskell, et al get nowadays.  But I needed to get some work done, and I'm getting old and have a limited amount of time and wet RAM, so I wanted to pick one language to learn and use, even if it wasn't the best at all things.  I looked around at various languages, and Tcl's features seemed to me to best suit my problem domain.

skottish

Forum Fellow

From: Here

Registered: 2006-06-16

Posts: 7,942

Re: Freaking weird programming language (Tcl)

This is a bit under-used thread, but...

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/ios/12_ … t_tcl.html