Subject: Re: CCL:TCL Comp. Chem tools..

From: [email-masked] (Hinsen Konrad)
Date: Sat, 6 May 95 10:07:41 -0400

Hinsen Konrad ([email-masked]) has been railing against the use of
   Tcl for scripting chemistry tools, and against the premature establishment of
   standards.

Don't get me wrong: I have nothing against Tcl *for scripting*. That's what
it was made for. I was just pointing out that one should not miss the
opportunity to get something better than a mere scripting language.

   Folks with PCs used them to design today's better architectures. No one said,
   "everyone must use the PC-clone architecture." It just happened, and as a
   result, computers became cheap commodities and the world benefitted
   immeasurably.

And the world would have benefitted much more if more companies had
developed innovative concepts for one or two more years instead of
cloning the IBM PC, whose conceptual problems were evident when it
came out.

But I don't really blame anyone for that development. I am just proposing
that one should learn from the mistakes of the past and not repeat them.

   Structured programming would never have been invented if the power of
   high-level language programming hadn't been demonstrated by FORTRAN.

Again, I don't blame anyone for developing or using Fortran. Fortran
was an enormous step forward, compared to machine languages. I blame
those who failed to explore alternatives and forced generations
of scientists and engineers to stick with it even after its weaknesses
became appearant. The advantages of modern object-oriented languages
compared to Fortran (I am always referring to Fortran 77) are as
important as were the advantages of Fortran compared to Assembler
in the late 50s.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Konrad Hinsen                     | E-Mail: [email-masked]
Departement de chimie             | Tel.: +1-514-343-6111 ext. 3953
Universite de Montreal            | Fax:  +1-514-343-7586
C.P. 6128, succ. A                | Deutsch/Esperanto/English/Nederlands/
Montreal (QC) H3C 3J7             | Francais (phase experimentale)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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From: [email-masked] (David J. States)
Date: Sat, 6 May 1995 20:28:39 -0500

|> Tk is one reason for Tcl's popularity, but there is also the fact
|> that it is an embeddable language, which Perl isn't. There are
|> indeed other alternatives for Tk; in addition to TkPerl, there is
|> also a Scheme interface to Tk.
|> 
|> There are alse other embeddable languages, including more powerful
|> ones that Tcl (Python for example).

One of the major new features of perl 5 is embedding.  Both perl->C
and C->perl interfaces are provided.  If you were frustrated by some
of the limitations of perl 4, it might be worth taking another look.

David States
Institute for Biomedical Computing / Washington University in St. Louis