Version 30 of Marco Maggi

Updated 2005-01-18 06:24:28 by MM

Sometimes I sign myself with MM.

I'm trying to become an electrical engineer, but it's a looong way. :(

I've first met TCL in 1996 (I think), when reading an introductory book on GNU/Linux: I was astonished by the easiness to create GUI with TK, and it made me forget for some year my wish to learn the C language.

I wrote my first script on a PC with RedHat Linux 4.0: it was a really ugly text editor, but since I wrote it using XEdit first and then with another editor related to the OLWM window manager (I can't remember the name), it looked wonderful to me. Then I learned how to use GNU/Emacs. :)

Now I'm a Debian user, and I have upgraded my machine.


I'm really interested in programming TCL bindings to existing C libraries: I find useful to see how experienced programmers organise the API.

So here are my projects:

ztcl
interface to the ZLib compression library;
bztcl
interface to the BZip2 compression library;
mhtcl
interface to the mhash library of hashing algorithms;
tclnettle
interface to the nettle cryptographic library.

All of them should be usable: I've tried to write a comprehensive test suite. I've not done a real test to exclude memory leaks, though.

I'm slowly adding bits to a C library of containers: vector, list, map, tree, set, etc. I hope to make a TCL interface to it someday.

I'm also working at a couple of packages that are the battle fields for all my TCL programming ideas:

UTP
a collection of TCL packages [L1 ];
UWP
a TK framework [L2 ];

the "U" in both the acronyms stands for "Useless": there's no guarantee that the packages can be loaded in an interpreter without syntax errors. Other packages:

APIC
vector graphics for LaTeX with TeXdraw.

All these packages and others can be downloaded from:

       <http://web.tiscali.it/marcomaggi/software/index.html>

my ISP does what he want, so you have to turn on Javascript to reach the page. :(

The GNU Lesser General Public License is my favourite software license.


My ideas about programming have evolved through the last years. Once I was an OOP enthusiast, although I'm not expert of OO languages. I've tried my first C++ classes with Borland Turbo C 3.1. A lovely environment.

But lately I've changed my mind: more I write C stuff, more I find C "enough" for me.

I really like the style of C coding adopted in the TCL core source code. The lack of time (and skills) is keeping me away from trying to contribute to it. :(


I'm maintaining some pages here at the TCL Wiki:


If someone wants to email me, just take the SMTP hostname of my ISP, which is "tiscali.it", and join it with my mail username, which is "marcomaggi". Death to spammers.


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