The MathWorks, Inc. [L1 ] styles MATLAB [L2 ] as "the language of technical computing". MathWorks is an interesting company; it continued to hire programmers all through 2002 and at least the beginning of 2003, despite the general depression in IT.
The quickest, lightest way to get Tcl and MATLAB talking is through DDE. MATLAB also exposes a COM interface that permits essentially fully general control, although it's documented with as much mystery as seems to be canonical with COM. Paul McGuire has documented his experience in COM control [L3 ] with Python; most of this knowledge translates easily to Tcl.
TMath and TCL-MAT both bind Tcl and MATLAB.
Octave is an open-source replacement for MATLAB.
Perhaps NAP is also of interest.
[Link to article on Open Source vs. proprietary for scientists, available through [L4 ].]