31–40 of 72 posts
Tcl is basically a sloppier Perl with a GUI.
One thing which I've always not understood about Tcl/TK is why there isn't a standard graphical tool for laying out a GUI program. For a long while, when I might have used Tcl/TK, I instead used Runtime Revolution/Livecode (a cross-platform HyperCard clone) which had a very nice system for interactively drawing programs. I'd really like for there to be an agreed-upon standard option for graphical program development…
My favorite obscure line of TCL: https://github.com/athas/EggsML/blob/master/concieggs/hooks/... A line that contains a regex pattern for matching regex patterns. TCL was chosen here because its regex engine isn't too powerful.
Uh, not sure I see the significance but wouldn't that make Tcl less apt for this than something else? Why would you purposely choose a less powerful regex engine?
One thing which I've always not understood about Tcl/TK is why there isn't a standard graphical tool for laying out a GUI program. For a long while, when I might have used Tcl/TK, I instead used Runtime Revolution/Livecode (a cross-platform HyperCard clone) which had a very nice system for interactively drawing programs. I'd really like for there to be an agreed-upon standard option for graphical program development…
As a self-taught novice programmer that started with QBasic and had moved on to Turbo Pascal, I found Tcl to be very confusing and it left a rather negative impression.
Reading this page now though, it seems a lot more logical and reasonable than it appeared at the time.
Another excellent aspect of Tcl I found is extensibility of JO's C implementation. At some point I needed to write some native code for speed and making this visible to the Tcl interpreter was a pleasure. Plus the codebase is so clean and well written.
(we did exactly this for networking code about 30 years ago: C for the data plane and Tcl for the control plane. That architecture remained in service for decades.)
The biggest weakness IMHO is the inability to comment out elements of an array. Even bash lets you do this and it makes testing and dev so much easier. Really wanted to love it, but that got in the way too many times.
The biggest problem with Tcl is the fact that C won. This means that "" and {} are expected to work a certain way from C and when you hit Tcl you are HORRIBLY confused. It's especially confusing as {} is simply quoting and has nothing to do with scope . The fact that Tcl is written such that {} is used with indentation in if-statements muddies the issue even further. I suspect that a choice of ` (backtick) for Tcl "…
My favorite obscure line of TCL: https://github.com/athas/EggsML/blob/master/concieggs/hooks/... A line that contains a regex pattern for matching regex patterns. TCL was chosen here because its regex engine isn't too powerful.
>TCL was chosen here because its regex engine isn't too powerful. Uh, not sure I see the significance but wouldn't that make Tcl less apt for this than something else? Why would you purposely choose a less powerful regex engine?