41–50 of 72 posts
That's where it gets really criminal: Dynamic scoping rules. There is no lexical scoping and hence no closures. If you use `uplevel`, your procedure works or doesn't, depending on the caller. There is a reason Tcl is the last language that uses this braindead mechanism.
This language seems like a security nightmare to me regarding code injection attacks through untrusted inputs.
If you were going to handle "untrusted input", that's how you would do it in tcl.
Note: this is separate from tcl's multithreading capability, where it can also run individual interpreters per thread , with thread safe channels between them. (btw, you can mix & match both approaches - multithreading & nested interpreters)
Wish I had this page when messing around with Eggdrop[1] back in the late 90s. 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. [1]: https://docs.eggheads.org/tutorials/firstscript.html
This language seems like a security nightmare to me regarding code injection attacks through untrusted inputs.
I've long wished to have the free time to write a Tcl-derived language, because it really is so elegant in many ways, it just needs a bit of modernization in some areas. It's been years since I really thought much about this but I recall one of the things it's missing is closures (it does have lambdas at least). Reading through this article, the memoize implementation does have an issue which is if the memoized comma…
I've long wished to have the free time to write a Tcl-derived language, because it really is so elegant in many ways, it just needs a bit of modernization in some areas. It's been years since I really thought much about this but I recall one of the things it's missing is closures (it does have lambdas at least). Reading through this article, the memoize implementation does have an issue which is if the memoized comma…
Closures are not easy to fit with "everything is a string", which favors dynamic scoping over lexical scope. I wonder what you'd change to make tcl more amenable to modernization.
type Point struct {
X int
Y lnt
}
I think a lot of this ground was treaded with modern JS compilers (that had to infer a lot of this kind of information from very little context), or efforts like Python type annotations. Dynamic languages are still cool, and even cooler when the compiler can still somehow actively help you.
Fun fact: SQLite’s test suite is written in TCL https://github.com/sqlite/sqlite/blob/master/test/strict1.te...
I've long wished to have the free time to write a Tcl-derived language, because it really is so elegant in many ways, it just needs a bit of modernization in some areas. It's been years since I really thought much about this but I recall one of the things it's missing is closures (it does have lambdas at least). Reading through this article, the memoize implementation does have an issue which is if the memoized comma…
jimtcl, an alternative, simpler, much smaller implementation of tcl DOES have proper closures, along with other nicities like unifying arrays & dicts.
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…
> a cross-platform HyperCard clone I wish there were more of these, preferably open source (and, since I'm dreaming, native and web versions.) ;-)
Still annoyed about their changing course and removing the Community Edition.