[Richard Suchenwirth] 2002-11-15 - Tcl is mostly very relaxed about types ([everything is a string]), while other languages can spend much labor just on such classifications. Only where needed do value types matter - e.g. [list] functions don't accept any arbitrary string, [incr] wants a variable with integer value, etc. However, if you wish you can introduce type declarations that restrict the values being assigned to a variable, via write traces. They just do a harmless operation that would raise an error if the argument is not of specified type. As Tcl's [error] messages are so so clear mostly, I don't bother to catch them and raise my own instead, which makes these code snippets very simple: proc integer args { foreach arg $args { uplevel 1 "trace var $arg w {incr $arg 0 ;#}" } } % integer i % set i x can't set "i": expected integer but got "x" ---- proc List args { foreach arg $args { uplevel 1 "trace var $arg w {llength \[set $arg\] ;#}" } } % List foo % set foo {bar "grill} can't set "foo": unmatched open quote in list ---- [Category Concept] | [Arts and crafts of Tcl-Tk programming]