Tool Command Language


Tool Command Language

(language)/tik*l/ (Tcl) An interpreted string processinglanguage 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 writealgebraic expressions for simplicity and to avoid scaringpeople away. Though originally designed to be a "scriptinglanguage" rather than for serious programming, Tcl has beenused successfully for programs with hundreds of thousands oflines.

It has a peculiar but simple syntax. It may be used as anembedded interpreter in application programs. It hasexceptions and packages (called libraries), name-spacesfor procedures and variables, and provide/require. Itsupports dynamic loading of object code. It is eight-bit clean. It has only three variable types: strings, lists andassociative arrays but no structures.

Tcl and its associated GUI toolkit, Tk run on allflavors 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 patternmatch on their output), Cygnus Tcl Tools, [incr Tcl] (addsclasses and inheritence to Tcl), Scriptics (JohnOusterhout's company that is the home of Tcl development andthe TclPro tool suite), Tcl Consortium (a non-profit agencydedicated to promoting Tcl), tclhttpd (an embeddableTcl-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, Proc1990 Winter USENIX Conf].