From: claird@... (Cameron Laird)
Date: 2002-11-14T00:57:47+09:00
Subject: Re: A vision for Parrot

In article <3DD16F04.517E6720@earthlink.net>,
Benjamin Goldberg  <goldbb2@earthlink.net> wrote:
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>Thinking a bit more, particularly about how Tcl often needs to interpret
>strings at runtime, I realize that no non-trivial Tcl program can work
>without having a string-to-bytecode compiler.  Needless to say, this
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Tangential remark:  yes, in the sense that Tcl is just
a big 'ole macro processor, where everything is a string.
Sure, at that level, Tcl is constantly interpreting strings,
in a way that seems creepy from a Perl perspective.  Perl's
executable references correspond in Tcl to "scripts" (most
often) which appear as callbacks to [after], [bind], 
[fileevent], and so on.

On the other hand, at the level of application development,
working programmers should *not* be doing much of the [eval]
kind of string interpretation that once was thought necessary
style in Tcl, as well as Lisp and very few other languages.
Source code should look straightforward and plenty
procedural, and, in general, will not "interpret strings" 
after a first round of bytecode compilation.
-- 

Cameron Laird <Cameron@Lairds.com>
Business:  http://www.Phaseit.net
Personal:  http://phaseit.net/claird/home.html