I often run into syntactic prejudice when I am
writing software to spec.  This often seems to
preclude using Tcl, and precluding Tcl, of course, tends to
bloat the amount of work and the time and money
needed to accomplish it.  Eventually, however,
I came up with the "run" command - it's a replacement
for "source" but it does some extensive preprocessing
before running the code, allowing some really radical
language changes without any run-time overhead.

See [run] for the code...

Now, suppose we wish to add some syntactic sugar
to expr, and to have an input language looking like
Oberon or Modula.  We code this:

 source run.tcl

(see [run] for the compute proc, mentioned next).
 
"compute" is a macro that handles the translation
of "expr", and "xlate" is a simple textual substitution
table.  Now we can take the file "foo.tcl":

 # basic tcl syntax is still there:
 set x 1

 # So is new modula-style
 IF x <> 1 THEN
   puts "x is NOT 1"
 ELSE
   puts "x IS 1"
 END

and run it from a tcl script:

 run foo.tcl xlate

and what is actually sourced is:

 set x 1

 if { $x != 1 } {
   puts "x is NOT 1"
 } else {
   puts "x IS 1"
 }
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[sdw] - Another take on this concept is [TAO], essentially implementing OOP techniques using a pre-processor fed by an sql database.
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[Sarnold] - See also [xsource] for source preprocessing ideas.
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[Larry Smith]: Why is this page duplicating [run] and doing so without crediting me?

[CMcC] it appears, by comparing history of modification, that the person creating [run] also created this page, and that this page was created first.  Both were created nearly 5 years ago.

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