GSoC#5: A few words on Tcl (and an advice!)

After spending a couple of hours reddit-ing and other articles, I found some really interesting insights about Tcl which otherwise you might not never know about a programming language. So the following are some of the facts about Tcl which I found interesting and just stating them here:

To quote Philip Greenspun, as a software developer, you're unlikely to get rich. So you might as well try to get through your life in such a way that you make a difference to the world (like every startup shouts "make the world a better place"). Tcl illustrates one way:

• make something that is simple enough for almost everyone to understand,
• give away your source code
• explain how to "weave" your source code in with other systems

Looks something we can do? Yesss. But do we? Noo.

Tcl rocks! Well, everything IS a string, like in a fundamental way. Just look at the tape from a Turing Machine which is just an infinite mutable string. This is really, really true. Like, when you do something like a for loop, you're basically running a "for" command and passing it four strings.

 for {set x 0} {$x<10} {incr x} {  
   puts "hey"  
 }  

is equivalent to:

 for "set x 0" {$x<10} "incr x" "puts \"hey\""  

:o :o

Numbers and strings being interchangeable actually works. Everything being a string, is damn powerful but takes a while to get into the mindset that you are not just coding the solution up but programming the programming to the solution. 

Oh, and the "uplevel". "uplevel" is a terrifying and baffling feature. It gives you access to the local variables of any function that called you.. Say, whaaat?

Tcl : scripting languages :: C : compiled languages.

 As jaymaj21 comments on reddit, "simple small footprint, least hairy implementation." One of the most efficiently parsed scripting languages, Tcl is simple and way easy to implement. You can just write up your own Tcl interpreter very quick. You can write a Tcl program that pokes around the run-time environment, for example, using "info exists x".

A language that is not powerful by itself can become powerful if a procedure can invoke the interpreter, that is, if a program can write a program and then ask to have it evaluated. In Tcl, you do this by calling eval!

Tcl is more of "Tcl, C Library" because you can access about everything from C in a way that's pleasant to use. 

God was I lucky to get a Tcl project for my GSoC. Finger lickin' good!