MJ

Real name Mark Janssen (Tcl Chatroom nick: mjanssen). I have been using Tcl since 2004 and I love it.

There are several reasons I love Tcl:

• It supports Unicode in code and GUI
• The community is great
• It is truly interactive: Open a console in your application and see what is really going on
• Tclkit or Starkit deployment is very, very convenient
• It is very easy to install libraries without changing config files all over the place
• The community is great
• Very simple syntax and everything is a string: This allows for some funky stuff like redefining proc
• The C-API is one of the easiest of any of the ones I have seen (Perl, Python, Ruby) this makes it very easy to wrap C libraries. See for an example readline
• The community is great

Current projects

• Embedding tcc in a Tcl extension. It can compile an example Tcl extension at the moment tdom and supports VFS

Pages I contributed to

• Alternative Namespaces
• Tailing widget
• Tcl Interface to WinPCAP
• less
• readline
• Angles on a compass
• exec quotes problem
• SNMP parser
• WBXML
• tedit - Tcl only text editor with Emacs like functionality (sort of). Bindtags are so cool.
• newexec
• Self and my C-implementation at SELF extension
• scriptaculous
• SOCKS proxy
• XOTcl Objects as Tcl Commands with subcommands
• Tuplespace
• Event tutorial
• Engineering Notation
• Overridden commands - restoring Tcl internal commands that have been overridden beyond your control
• Wizard
• Retrieve file icon using the Win32 API
• Scratchpad
• NTLM
• cal
• chan mode
• Extending chan - Extending Tcl core commands implemented with namespace ensembles
• Tcl in a hybrid of RealLife and More Equal Pigs
• SCGI
• Splitting an amount in parts
• Retrieving movie information from IMDB
• TkTreeCtrl
• tcc - and more specifically tcltcc, a Tcl binding to tcc (hosted at [L1 ])
• tunnel
• freezeconfig
• Entering Unicode characters in a widget
• Finding duplicate files
• Interfacing Windows Search
• A Simple Wiki with Outlook backend
• A DSL to generate XSD files
• Tcl2Exe Using sdx and a build file to quickly wrap tcl scripts and applications as executables.
• Example of a Tcl extension in Free Pascal Using FreePascal to write stub enabled Tcl extensions.
• Track a library that can be used to write your own web framework.
• tcljupyter a Tcl kernel for Jupyter notebooks.
• XML Inspect a Tk window which allows browsing and querying of an XML document.

Random ideas I like to pursue

• Everything will be compiled (so not only procs)
• Image based Tcl ala Smalltalk
• Fast OO ala Self Extension
• Extensible parser allow {..}... to be extended from script level
• Better exec
• Faster Tcl IO performance
• Typed Tcl
• Tcl kernel for jupyter with support for display commands [L2 ]

TODO

• Tcl frontend to fossil db's
• Caching in the Self extension using epoch counters

Autoexpansion of leading word

I have created a Tcl git repo with changes needed to have auto-expansion of a leading word at [L3 ]. This allows data structures like TOOT with {*}. To demonstrate that example:

% set m {matrix {{1 2 3}
               {4 5 6}
               {7 8 9}}
        }
% proc matrix {matrix {method {}} args} {
     if {$method eq {}} {
        # return the 'typeless' matrix
        return $matrix
     }
   switch $method {
        row {
           return [lindex $matrix [lindex $args 0]]
        }
     }
  }
% $m ; #gives the undecorated matrix
{1 2 3}
               {4 5 6}
               {7 8 9}
% $m row 1
4 5 6

Which is a thing of beauty IMO.

The git repo linked to is dead, but the change to enable autoexpansion seems to be almost trivial.

--- generic/tclParse.c
+++ generic/tclParse.c
@@ -301,11 +301,11 @@
 
     parsePtr->commandStart = src;
     type = CHAR_TYPE(*src);
     scanned = 1;        /* Can't have missing whitepsace before first word. */
     while (1) {
-        int expandWord = 0;
+        int expandWord = (parsePtr->numWords==0);
 
         /* Are we at command termination? */
 
         if ((numBytes == 0) || (type & terminators) != 0) {
             parsePtr->term = src;

Everything I post on the wiki is in the public domain unless explicitly marked otherwise. I would love to hear if some of it was useful to you though.