Differences between version 14 and predecessor to the previous major change of TCL.
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| Newer page: | version 14 | Last edited on Friday, June 17, 2005 2:48:05 pm | by SidSwami | Revert |
| Older page: | version 13 | Last edited on Friday, June 17, 2005 12:26:44 am | by AristotlePagaltzis | Revert |
@@ -1,22 +1,18 @@
An [Acronym] for __T__ool __C__ommand __L__anguage.
It is a scripting language embedded in many applications, much like [Elisp] is used in [Emacs] and VisualBasic is in many MicrosoftWindows applications. (This does not mean these languages have anything in common; actually they're about as far apart from each other as imaginably possible.)
-Tcl is available on all [Unix]-like platforms, as
well as on MicrosoftWindows. It is almost always combined
with the [Tk] ToolKit. This
makes it a good choice for portable
[GUI] scripting. There is also a less popular standalone interpreter
.
+While not
well suited for writing large programs, its common combination
with the [Tk] ToolKit makes creating
[GUI]s fairly easy — the VisualBasic of the Unix world, if you will
.
-Tcl was intended to serve as a a really simple, universal scripting interface to compiled libraries and applications. The complexity of large codebases was supposed to be carried inside these libraries and applications, with their Tcl bindings serving more as a glue layer for rapid adaptation and recombination. Tcl itself was not orginally meant to be used as a standalone language. To that end,
the biggest, foremost concerns in its design were extensibility and embeddability rather than the needs
of large, complex codebases. The language is limited; variables can only be accessed by by name, not by value or by reference. Complex nested data structures were impossible to create until fairly recently. Since people kept using Tcl as a stand-alone language, support for nested lists was added to accomodate them, though manipulating such structures remains painful.
-
-The
[Tk] ToolKit was a significant success for the original Tcl model, but no others have followed
. In practice, dynamic languages like
[Perl], [Python] and [Ruby] which
are designed to carry the complexity of a large codebase on their own proved more popular at the one end, while fully scriptable applications never caught on at the other end. With [Tk]'s popularity long since dwindling, giving way to [GTK] and [Qt], so does the prominence of Tcl. Most people would consider it obsolete, though as with any technology (particularly in the OpenSource world), it has found a small following of supporters and enthusiasts who continue to evolve it. There is also still a moderate but significant amount of legacy TclTk code around
.
+Most people would probably consider it obsolete;
the dwindling popularity
of [Tk] only contributes to this
. [Perl], [Python] and [Ruby] are all far preferrable
.
See also:
* The Tcl community is working on the official [Tcl Tutorial | http://www.tcl.tk/man/tcl8.5/tutorial/tcltutorial.html]
+* [The Tcler's wiki | http://wiki.tcl.tk/], a useful resource on Tcl.
+* [Manual Pages | http://www.tcl.tk/man/]
* [Tcl Developer Xchange | http://www.tcl.tk/]
-* [The Tcler's wiki | http://wiki.tcl.tk/], a very useful resource on [TCL].
* [The Tcl newsgroup | http://groups-beta.google.com/group/comp.lang.tcl?hl=en]
-* [Tclwise | http://www.invece.org/tclwise/], a partially online book about Tcl, may be a little challenging to newcomers but certainly
worthwhile.
-* tclsh(1)
-* tclsh8.3(1)
-* wish(1)
-* wish8.3(1)
+* [Tclwise | http://www.invece.org/tclwise/], a partially online book about Tcl, may be a little challenging to newcomers but worthwhile.
+
----
CategoryProgrammingLanguages, CategoryVeryHighLevelProgrammingLanguages
