Ways to execute Perl programs from Tcl

There are several ways to execute Perl programs from Tcl applications. Most succinct is simply to apply Tcl's powerful exec in a command such as

    exec my_program.pl

[Explain open, and other IPC, more generally.]

See also Concepts of Architectural Design for Tcl Applications and Inventory of IPC methods.

It's quick work in Tcl to code a

    proc perl_interpret script {
        return [exec perl << [uplevel [list subst -novariables -noback $script]]]
    }

which allows one to write

    set a 13
    set b 79

     puts [perl_interpret {
         $result = [set a] + [set b];
         print "The sum is ", $result, ".\n";
     }]

Phil Ehrens offers a slightly more elaborate version:

      proc perl { args } {
           set perl_opts -e
           foreach arg $args {
              # pick off things that look like options
              # to pass to perl
              if { [ regexp {^-+\S+$} $arg ] } {
                 set perl_opts [ concat $arg $perl_opts ]
              } else {
                # and the rest is the code and the file args 
                lappend perl_code $arg
              }
           }
           # this is the debugging code ;^)
           puts stderr "perl $perl_opts $perl_code"
           catch { eval exec perl $perl_opts $perl_code } result
           return $result
      }

An example usage of this is

      perl "print \"foo!\n\"; print \"bar\""

Tclperl is quite nice. So is the Perl widget, although in a much different way.

Inline::Tcl [L1 ]. And module Tcl [L2 ].

More recent version of Perl modules to access Tcl/Tk and vice versa is at [L3 ], allows invoking of perl scripts as [::perl::Eval {print "hello, I am Perl"}] VK