From: Mathieu Bouchard <matju@...>
Date: 2005-01-30T09:22:40+09:00
Subject: Re: When little languages grow...


On Fri, 28 Jan 2005, tony summerfelt wrote:
> On Thu, 27 Jan 2005 10:46:38 +0900, you wrote:
> >Another thing I like about Tcl is that it has _no_ special cases. 
> 
> i'm not sure you'd define them as 'special cases' but tcl can be
> quirky if you come from a language like perl:
> set x 1

Perl: set(\$x,1);

> and to refer to it  you use '$' so: 
> puts $x

the slashed-s $ means "Substitute" in Tcl, whereas it means "Scalar". In
Tcl, $ is used to read variables.

> but to increment it you'd do:
> incr x
> ie. no '$' used.

Perl: incr(\$x);

btw those examples in Perl are using refs-to-scalar, but the actual Tcl
implementation uses strings and a thing called upvar/uplevel to access
other scopes on the stack. This is because Tcl completely lacks any notion
of pointer.

> >That kind of goodies is the things that make Tcl quite bearable to me,
> >despite lacking a damn lot features 
> which features is it missing for you?

in two words: Pointers, Objects.

> >I still have to work with Tcl because of a GUI made in Tk, but I'm quite
> >happy with it.
> tk is easily one of the quicker ways to crank out a gui for an
> application in tcl...

For a long time it was IMHO the quickest way to crank a gui, period, no
but's. I remember starting to learn to code Motif in C back in 1997 (when
there was no Gtk, and Qt was unknown), and a friend showed me Tcl/Tk and
my jaw dropped. Nowadays, there are a lot of possible combination of
high-level languages and gui-toolkits that are quite good and fast to
develop in.

_____________________________________________________________________
Mathieu Bouchard -=- Montr�al QC Canada -=- http://artengine.ca/matju