Colin McCormack: Eggdrop is apparently some kind of IRC script thing which brings the niceness of tcl scripting.
The Tcl Chatroom is occasionally visited by some poor lost eggdropper who has bumped into tcl because of his or her desire to do something in Eggdrop. There seems to be no way to dissuade them, because apparently whatever eggdrop community there is doesn't provide much support, and for the most part they have difficulty grasping the concept that Tcl isn't Eggdrop (much as English isn't Hunter S. Thompson.)
Tclers can't, with the best will in the world, help these lost eggdroppers, as very few Tclers are also Eggdroppers, and apparently the converse is also true.
If there were more Eggdroppers who were also Tclers, that might be a good thing for Tcl. After all, we were all n00bs once, and people have to start somewhere, and if Eggdropping is a way into Tcl, that's good - fresh meat.
It's kind of interesting that there are so few Tclers who are into Eggdrop. Precisely none, as far as I can tell. Why is that? I wonder whether it's because Eggdrop is not a very good or interesting Tcl system. Perhaps it's that Eggdrop isn't an interesting application to most Tclers, but I think that's too great a coincidence.
I would like to suggest that someone (not me :) throw together a quick replacement for Eggdrop, and that we collectively try to undertake its support. It oughtn't to be too hard, or too onerous.
Lars H: I sort of doubt this would be easy. Just look at the size of the command reference [L1 ] for Eggdrop — I get the impression it is at least as complex as e.g. Expect.
CMcC Thanks for that Suggestion, Lars. I took it, and understand something about Eggdrop. It seems that it's been designed by someone who wanted to hide tcl from the user. There seem to be numerous commands which I imagine would be very small wrappers around a more detailed tcl command. This might explain why the eggdroppers are unskilled in tcl - it's a side effect of the eggdrop design. It might make more sense to provide a higher level interface which can do everything eggdrop does, but which presupposes some tcl coding skill. Perhaps a library of some kind.
CMcC I think, to effect some kind of connection between the two communities of interest, there needs to be a gesture from the Tcl communities. Mainly because I think the Tcl community has more ability to make the gesture and establish the communication.
AMG: In an extremely indirect and probably inconsequential way, Eggdrop got me into Tcl. I learned Tcl to help hack OpenVerse, which was then called Metaverse. I guess you could say OV was inspired by XiRCON, an IRC client written in Tcl. Eggdrop's also an IRC client (albeit scripted, not interactive) written in Tcl. Does anyone know if there's a more meaningful connection between XiRCON and Eggdrop?
DG: Wait a moment there AMG.. XiRCON is not ZiRCON. XiRCON was written in C++ and used Tcl for scripting. If one is really looking for an IRC client that has the same scripting interface as eggdrop, BitchX [L2 ] has the complete eggdrop sub-system in it. And second-off, Eggdrop is an IRC robot, not an IRC client. I did attempt a XiRCON clone [L3 ], but it is far from finished.
AMG: Homonyms will be the death of us all!
RS: One little demo for scripting IRC is minibot.