Version 2 of Starter Tcl

Updated 2002-05-29 23:57:56

This page considers what software should be put in front of newcomers to the language.

Differs for different platforms - as well as for different intersets.

  • Unix
  1. C compiler
  2. GNU autoconf (???)
  3. Some sort of text editor
  4. Tcl - the place to learn hello, world
  5. TkTutor - a good tutorial for intro to Tcl
  6. Tk - the place to learn it graphically
  7. Tkcon - a good interface
  8. Tcllib - a good collection of useful Tcl code
  9. TclX - a lot of useful Unix-like extras
  10. Expect - very useful to automate command line apps, also some nice debugging tools
  11. Img - very useful to display various image types
  12. Snack - sound generation
  13. Some sort of database Oratcl, etc.
  14. TclPro for visual debugger, static checker, binary wrapper
  15. Frink is another static checker
  16. tclvfs is in my opinion going to be a must have extension, for doing useful new things simply
  17. Thread is an extension to make simple threads available to the Tcl programmer

Many/most of these are in ActiveTcl - however, not all platforms are supported by Activestate.

[ ActiveTcl, TclKit, Kitten, SmallTcl, ...]

  • MacOSD
  1. C compiler
  2. GNU autoconf (???)
  3. Some sort of text editor
  4. Tcl - the place to learn hello, world
  5. TkTutor - a good tutorial for intro to Tcl
  6. Tk - the place to learn it graphically
  7. Tkcon - a good interface
  8. Tcllib - a good collection of useful Tcl code
  9. QuickTimeTcl - interface to QuickTime
  • Windows

"Is there anything I should know before I start coding"


JCW - a plea: please also consider makign some zlib implementation interface "standard" - its absence is preventing several valuable uses (mounting a ZIP with TclVFS, for example)