Version 6 of Tcl vs. TCL

Updated 2004-07-03 20:35:15

George Peter Staplin: It's interesting to me how the vernacular of some groups is to spell the language as Tcl, while others use TCL. I'm not sure when Tcl became the name. Going back to the archives of Tcl I find that the oldest distributation available on SourceForge is tcl2.1.sysv. In the README file Ousterhout uses the term "Tcl." ([1]) Even though it stands for "Tool Command Language" in some way.

Perl at one time stood for "Practical Extraction and Report Language," but most people spell it Perl. It's usually pronounced like the word Pearl.

How should one pronounce Tcl? Most programmers say "tickle." You may find that people won't take you seriously if you say that, so T-C-L or "Tool Command Language" may work better in such cases.

A similar argument is how to pronounce Linux. Some say "Lie nux," while others use "lee nux" or "lin ux."

Does it really matter?

  1. "This directory contains the sources for Tcl, an embeddable tool command language. For an introduction to the facilities provided by Tcl, see the paper ``Tcl: An Embeddable Command Language'', in the Proceedings of the 1990 Winter USENIX Conference."

LES I can't take seriously the argument that "people won't take you seriously if you say tickle". That's the language's name, I even have been told that the logo is a feather because "it tickles", so what do we have feel ashamed about? I think that Tcl is very overlooked and/or underrated, but I don't think the name has anything to do with it.


[Category Fluffery] | [Category Pointless Arguments]