/tik*l/ (Tcl) An interpreted string processing
language for issuing commands to
interactive programs,
developed by
John Ousterhout at
UCB. Each
application program can extend tcl with its own set of commands.
Tcl is like a text-oriented
Lisp, but lets you write
algebraic expressions for simplicity and to avoid scaring
people away. Though originally designed to be a "scripting
language" rather than for serious programming, Tcl has been
used successfully for programs with hundreds of thousands of
lines.
It has a peculiar but simple
syntax. It may be used as an
embedded
interpreter in application programs. It has
exceptions and packages (called libraries), name-spaces
for procedures and variables, and provide/require. It
supports
dynamic loading of
object code. It is
eight-bit clean. It has only three variable types: strings, lists and
associative arrays but no structures.
Tcl and its associated
GUI toolkit,
Tk run on all
flavors of
Unix,
Microsoft Windows,
Macintosh and
VMS.
Tcl runs on the
Amiga and many other platforms.
Latest version: 8.0.3, as of 1998-09-25.
See also
expect (control interactive programs and pattern
match on their output),
Cygnus Tcl Tools,
[incr Tcl] (adds
classes and inheritence to Tcl),
Scriptics (John
Ousterhout's company that is the home of Tcl development and
the TclPro tool suite),
Tcl Consortium (a non-profit agency
dedicated to promoting Tcl),
tclhttpd (an embeddable
Tcl-based web server),
tclx (adds many commands to Tcl),
tcl-debug.
comp.lang.tcl FAQ at MIT.
or
at purl.org.
Scriptics downloads.
Kanji.
Usenet newsgroups: news:comp.lang.tcl.announce,
news:comp.lang.tcl.
["Tcl: An Embeddable Command Language", J. Ousterhout, Proc
1990 Winter USENIX Conf].