Version 7 of Peter Lewerin

What am I doing for Tcl?

See BOOK Programming Language Examples Alike Cookbook

Who I am

I have a solid procedural, compiled-languages background (read Pascal/C/C++) and have only recently discovered the beauty and power of scripting languages. The old dog may learn new tricks yet.

I have a Tcl Page in Swedish at http://home.swipnet.se/pelewin/tcl/ , but due to illness I haven't developed it much.

Trying out new languages, I usually attempt to port small familiar programs to them. One of those is the Bugs program from A K Dewdneys The Magic Machine. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you... TkBugs!

Opinions

Speaking of dogs, don't you hate Good girls don't languages too?

My favorite languages:

Tcl
Lisp
C
ML
Ruby or Smalltalk

I am beginning to think along these lines:

If someone wants to work with web applications, Perl is probably the best language to start with. Why? Because it's the most common language supported by web servers for CGI (I'm talking about commercial servers offering cheap web space, not about the ones you setup for yourself if you have the means), and there are tons of libraries and tutorials to get you started. It's also quite easy to progress to PHP if you want to.
If someone wants to learn OOP, Ruby ought to be the way to go. I've never seen a language that makes OOP so painless.
If someone wants to experiment with GUIs, there's no reason to look further than Tcl/Tk. One gets portable GUIs as well, which should be nice for student who typically uses Windows in school and Linux at home.
For the aspiring systems programmer; C has worked well for 30 years now and seems to be useful for some time yet (as Dennis Ritchie said, it is quirky and flawed, but a sturdy and flexible tool all the same). If you must mix systems programming and OOP, there's of course C++ or even C#. To reduce the massive workload facing a systems programmer, consider using Tcl as command language/monitoring tool, and test utility for your applications.

If neither of these goals seem very interesting, I'd recommend Tcl.

Did I mention Tcl?

What do you think?

Tools

Hmm, this[L1 ] seems like a nice tool for Tcl students. I'm not overly fond of syntax highlighting myself, but I know that students like it. I wonder if there are more worthwhile tools for teaching Tcl/Tk around?

Impressions

Since finding this Wiki, I have been very impressed by the applications described here, for instance A little hypertext system. This language packs a lot of punch in the hands of a creative and skilled programmer!

Someone posted an impromptu musing by me here: Tcl testimonials.

Eurolish

If you need to write a 7-bit-safe Swedish document or source code, the Eurolish conversions might prove useful. The following letters need to be supported to fully handle documents in the Swedish language:

    A+ring   -- A`` / a``
    A+umlaut -- A'' / a''
    O+umlaut -- O'' / o''
    E+acute  -- E' / e'
    U+umlaut -- U'' / u''

The first three are in the ``Swedish alphabet'' (in collation order). The last two are found in names and a few borrowed words, and are collated as e and u (or possibly y?), respectively.

Here's an example of a Tcl program using Swedish accented letters in variable names (note that the curlies are needed when getting the values of the variables):

    puts -nonewline "Vad heter du? "
    flush stdout
    set namn [gets stdin]
    puts -nonewline "Vilket �r �r du f�dd? "
    flush stdout
    set f�delse�r [gets stdin]
    set tid_nu [clock seconds]
    set nuvarande_�r [clock format $tid_nu -format "%Y"]
    set �lder [expr ${nuvarande_�r} - ${f�delse�r}]
    puts "I �r �r (eller blir) $namn ${�lder} �r gammal."

Useful pages on the Wiki

Several pages are useful, but this one gets my first bookmark for obvious reasons: http://purl.org/thecliff/tcl/wiki/SearchingAndBookmarkingURLsOnTheTcl'ersWiki

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