Tcl - the reason for most of the commotion on this Wiki! [What is Tcl]?

Tcl stands for Tool Command Language - but is not typically thought of as an acronym (and pronounced like "tickle" by all in the know). Best use the spelling with capital T and lowercase "cl" - TCL might mean different things, e.g. a Chinese electronics company.

There are so many URLs that could be placed here - hopefully the important ones make it:

http://www.purl.org/tcl/home/man/tcl8.4/TclCmd/Tcl.htm

http://purl.org/tcl/home/, http://www.tcl.tk/, and http://www.tcl-tk.net/ point to the same major web site containing lots of information regarding Tcl.

This wiki is yet another (and we Wikians strive to make it the richest!)

http://purl.org/net/tcl-faq/ is a series of pointers to other documents.

http://tcl.sf.net/ is the home for the source code of Tcl.  At this web site is not only the Tcl releases, but also the thread extension and currently some MacOS X snapshots.  The CVS also shows the sample [TEA] extension code residing in this project - unfortunately, it does not yet appear that this code has been released as a package.  It is, thank goodness, available from the CVS as well as from the CVS snapshot repository at ftp://www.tcl.tk/pub/tcl/nightly-cvs/ .

Read [to build and test Tcl] for more information on creating an executable library and stand alone scripting framework from the Tcl source code distribution.

[Binary Distributions] and [places to find Tcl binaries and sources] are two pages to discuss locating Tcl binaries.

http://www.tcl.tk/software/tcltk/platforms.html details the platforms known
to support Tcl and [Tk].

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tcl is a German wiki with useful articles on Tcl.

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How do you know you are using Tcl?  That's a good question - in some cases,
Tcl is inside a product and you may or may not even have access to the
scripting engine itself.

However, if you are wanting to write and execute a tcl script, you have
a number of options.


   * Out of the box, '''[tclsh]''' is a stand alone interpreter build from the tcl source code distribution
   * '''[wish]''' is a tcl interpreter with the Tk extension pre-loaded.  It is created when building [Tk].
   * [tclkit] is a all-in-one-file combination of Tcl, Tk, [Metakit], [Itcl], [tclvfs] and a few other extensions.
   * '''[expect]''' is a tcl interpreter with the expect extension pre-loaded.  It is created when building expect.
   * A command called '''tcl''' used to be built and installed as a part of building and installing the [Tclx] extension.  
   * '''itclsh''' is a tclsh pre-extended with [Itcl].
   * '''tixwish''' is built and installed as a part of the [Tix] build process
   * '''bltsh''' and '''bltwish''' are built and installed as a part of the [BLT] build process.
   * '''tcldomsh''' is built and installed as a part of the [TclDOM] build process
   * '''xotclsh''' and '''xowish''' are built and installed as a part of the [XOTcl] build process.

As of Tcl 8.4, the only interpreters that you really need to think about are '''tclsh''' and '''tclkit''' , as Tcl provides the ability to dynamically load any of the other extensions during runtime.  In fact, many of the extensions have been dropping the building and installing of custom extensions due to this.

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