Valhalla Legends Forums Archive | General Programming | TCL -- What do you guys think?

AuthorMessageTime
Networks
TCL (Pronounced "tickle") is a language that I was referred to by electrical engineer to learn for internships that I might be able to get. He told me that PERL was getting phased out for engineering and that they were going to be switching to TCL so therefore I am making great strides to learn it as I am an engineering major.

In anyevent, I was curious to know if anyone here at vL forums had heard of it, learned it, wanted to learn it, had any knowledge of it. I am obviously quite new to the language and I've found it to be awesome as far as simplicity and syntax are concerned. Definitely better then VB6 anyway. I was wondering if anyone knew of an IDE that works great for TCL. Something that produces great code highlighting and a great debugging environment especially for console mode tests not just something that is GUI only.

Also, tell me your thoughts on TCL. Is it shit? Is PERL definitely better? (Either way I am learning TCL but I am curious anyway)

I think it's a great language from what I've seen and learnt thus far which is only basics though.

You VB6 kids might want to take a look at this: http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-mini/VB6-to-Tcl.html

I saw an 11 lined file read done in 3 lines using TCL. Everything is pretty much compressed and still readable IMO. =)
July 2, 2006, 5:17 AM
St0rm.iD
TCL died a while ago. Perl is still in common use. I also don't like TCL's shellscripty-ness and braindead parser.
July 2, 2006, 2:58 PM
warz
[quote author=Banana fanna fo fanna link=topic=15311.msg155182#msg155182 date=1151852300]
TCL died a while ago. Perl is still in common use. I also don't like TCL's shellscripty-ness and braindead parser.
[/quote]

Agreed.
July 2, 2006, 9:09 PM
Yegg
[quote author=Banana fanna fo fanna link=topic=15311.msg155182#msg155182 date=1151852300]
TCL died a while ago. Perl is still in common use. I also don't like TCL's shellscripty-ness and braindead parser.
[/quote]

TCL died? Tk needs Tcl. How can you say that TCL is dead? Without it, there wouldn't be a Tkinter for Python. Various other languages rely on Tcl/Tk as a GUI library.

You've made it sound as if TCL as a whole has died. Is this true? Or did you mean TCL as more like a general purpose language?

Networks: If you like TCL because of it not requiring much code, I suggest you check out Scheme (my primary language). However the amount of lines you must type obviously doesn't determine how good a language is, there is much more to Scheme. If you have any questions, I can talk Saturday (long story).
July 3, 2006, 2:15 AM
Rule
I think Perl will always be the best language for certain tasks -- it's in standard usage, and there's just not much to improve on.  No-one really cares about efficiency for most scripts, and Perl is very easy to use.
July 3, 2006, 2:40 AM
St0rm.iD
[quote author=Yegg link=topic=15311.msg155231#msg155231 date=1151892920]
[quote author=Banana fanna fo fanna link=topic=15311.msg155182#msg155182 date=1151852300]
TCL died a while ago. Perl is still in common use. I also don't like TCL's shellscripty-ness and braindead parser.
[/quote]

TCL died? Tk needs Tcl. How can you say that TCL is dead? Without it, there wouldn't be a Tkinter for Python. Various other languages rely on Tcl/Tk as a GUI library.
[/quote]

Tk is dead, too. You're not supposed to use Tkinter in anything real.

[quote]
You've made it sound as if TCL as a whole has died. Is this true? Or did you mean TCL as more like a general purpose language?
[/quote]

Tool Control Language -- a better shellscript bastardized for application usage.

[quote]
Networks: If you like TCL because of it not requiring much code, I suggest you check out Scheme (my primary language). However the amount of lines you must type obviously doesn't determine how good a language is, there is much more to Scheme. If you have any questions, I can talk Saturday (long story).
[/quote]

If you're looking for radical paradigm shifts, try Scheme, Smalltalk, Haskell, or Erlang.
July 3, 2006, 4:41 AM
Networks
From what I've seen TCL seems very efficient and quite easy to code in. The syntax is slightly different. I think the only issue I have is its excessive use of curly brackets, that's about it and you can quickly get used to something like that.
July 3, 2006, 6:27 PM
Arta
I've played with it a little. I quite liked it. I'm not sure how useful it would be for anything substantial, though -- the above comments sound plausible.
July 7, 2006, 2:14 PM

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