Tcl (was Re: [oclug] UNIX philosophy (was Re: vim rulez...))

[David F. Skoll]

On Wed, 18 Apr 2001, Jon Earle wrote:

> Last version of Tcl/Tk I used was 8.0.  It didn't have a real array
> construct (it's version of "arrays" is like C structs) and Tk had no table
> widget.  This meant building tables of data using Tcl/Tk was _really_
> ugly!

> Has this changed in recent versions?

Yes and no.  Yes, there is an add-on table widget called TkTable.  No,
Tcl still does not have real arrays (they are associative arrays, or in
Perlspeak, hashes.)

[incr Tcl] gives Tcl an object-oriented extension, and this is good for
building data structures.  But pure Tcl is not suitable for structured data.
The best thing about Tcl, I think, is that the API for embedding it into
C is very clean and well thought-out.  I use Tcl/Tk for scripting and GUI,
and C or C++ for time-consuming or complex processing.

--
David.