[TV]

I've thus far tested [Maxima] on windows (XP), and it proved to be usefull and useable, not in the least because of 
it's integration with tcl, though maybe that isn't perfect from a strict programmer's point of view.

The mechanism which is used in maxima to interface between the Tcl and Tk supplied user interface (at least on windows) 
is that a maxima process communicates with the Tcl/Tk interface process over a socket, over which mainly text is 
being send back and forth containing mathematica statements/commands/formulas and the answers from the 
maxima 'engine', a technique succesfully used in professional software of various kinds. The possible disadvantage 
is that for each communication, process change is needed in the process time slicer, which probably works at at most 
a granularity of a millisecond or so. Most maxima commands aren't executed blazing fast, and usually don't really 
need to, so that in practice is probably not a granularity problem.

As stated on the [maxima] page, the way normally the tcl/tk + maxima 'program' maxima.exe communicates the user input 
to the maxima lisp based core primarily by reading from and outputting to a text widget, which from UI perspective is 
not a bad idea. In fact it appears the maxima.exe is a tclkit (tcl+tk+incrtcl+metakit) appearently calling some scripts, 
and in the same dir with as.exe, gcc.exe, and some dlls. Not very handy in my opinion, I'd prefer a few script files 
which simply normally start up tcl/tk of which I control the installation, which works fine for me, and would seem 
to require less files, and be more overseeable. Maybe I'll try, and in the process see if that way a more recent tcl/tk 
can be used.