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

From: [email-masked] (David J. States)
Date: Sat, 6 May 1995 07:45:00 -0500

|> > Before everyone becomes too enthusiastic about Tcl, I would like
|> > to point out that Tcl - like most "scripting" languages - is
|> > very limited, especially when it comes to data manipulation.
|> > If all you want is to automatize a short sequence of actions,
|> > that's fine - but don't expect more from it.
|> 
|> Actually, you really are selling Tcl short. Some very nice applications can
|> be and have been written using Tcl and the various extensions that are
|> available. It *is* a complete programming language. The portability,
|> extensibility, and lisp-like ability to treat code as data and vice-versa
|> make it ideal for developing large heterogeneous distributed systems.

Having inadvertantly touched off a lively on Tcl, let me ask, what
about TkPerl?  People use Tcl in order to use Tk.  Without the Tk GUI
tools, I don't think there would be much enthusiasm for Tcl just as a
scripting language.  At least some of us find it hard to deal with the
lisp-like syntax of Tcl and already work in perl (what can I say, I
also prefer vi over emacs, C over C++, and live in the midwest).  Perl
has established its vaiability as a programming language in its own
right, and Perl5 fixes many of the rough edges in earlier versions
(pointers, multidimensional arrays, foreign language interfaces, ...).
Perl is also a compiled language which gives it better compute
performance, and perl has a very rich set of intrinsics and extensions
(regular expressions, system calls, RDBMS interfaces, etc.).  So how
come no comments on Perl/TkPerl in all the Tcl/Tk discussion?

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

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From: [email-masked] (Hinsen Konrad)
Date: Sat, 6 May 95 10:39:22 -0400

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).

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