From: ptkwt@... (Phil Tomson)
Date: 2005-04-04T02:04:46+09:00
Subject: Re: Getting Ruby approved

In article <slrnd4vaae.ge8.jeremy@ganglion.onepoint>,
Jeremy Henty  <jeremy@chaos.org.uk> wrote:
>In article <d2n6er12qpq@enews2.newsguy.com>, Phil Tomson wrote:
>
>> ... I've used Tcl on and off over the years and personally, I 
>> would not want to do a substantial project in it.  
>
>Having done a fair amount of Tcl programming both at home and at work,
>I completely agree.  There are two reasons why I would overwhelming
>prefer to do such a thing in Ruby (or even in Perl 5):
>
>1.  Tcl doesn't have first class data structures.  I can't create an
>associative array, populate it, and pass the result to another bit of
>code.  I have to fake it with call-by-name and upvar.  Yeuch!
>
>2.  Tcl doesn't have lexical scoping.  If I pass a block of code
>around I have to uplevel it to run it in the right context.  Worse, I
>have to uplevel it by exactly the number of stack frames between the
>proc that supplies the block and the proc that executes it, which puts
>a burden on refactoring.  Double Yeuch!  In Ruby this just works; it
>doesn't get in the way.

OMG!  I forgot about that upvar and uplevel stuff - I guess I blocked it 
out of my memory.  Triple Yuck!

>
>That said, Tcl's embedding API design is superb.  I really hope Rite
>copies it.  

Or at least learns a great deal from it.

Phil