Also see "Is Tcl Different!", "Why Tcl is better than Perl" [L2 ], "How Tcl is special", ...
(Supply more references.)
Performance is rarely cited as a Tcl advantage. In fact, it's far more common to be asked about "Why Tcl is so much slower than Perl".
I don't use perl much any more. After I spent an hour chasing down a variable that was unexpectably global (the default when I last used perl) I decided that any language where all variables are global unless you specifically say otherwise was not a language I wanted to debug.
Just use "use strict;" which will ensure that you declare all variables as local.
No, use strict; simply means you have to declare all your variables but they can be global or local.
"use strict;" feels like "oops we did it the wrong way, but we'll fix it by making the wrong way optional". Does perl have other optional bad ways to do things? If you take up perl, you probably will get asked to try to repair something written by someone else who didn't "use strict;".
Peter Newman 5 March 2004: Perl is better at almost everything coding related than Tcl - EXCEPT Tk! The Tk syntax in Perl is horribly convoluted. Whereas in Tcl it's clean and simple. So:-
But there are other application specific things that could sway your decision. For example:-
But for a commercial application, the GUI is probably the most important thing. If it ain't clean and simple and easy and pleasant to use, users just won't use it. And producing such GUI's is MUCH easier in Tcl than Perl.
NEM HTML::Tree - what's so good about this? I haven't used it, but I was wondering whether it was more useful than say tdom's [dom parse -html] mode? Or the htmlparse library in tcllib?
With regards to doing "HTTP, FTP" etc, I'd say things lean more in Tcl's favour here - the event loop, unified channel api, and vfs. Cross-platform networking is a doddle.
Back to "parsing text" - lots of people use Tcl to do a lot of this. I understand the "Perl was originally designed for this" argument, but what are the differences in reality? Is it just Perl's terseness? Or are their some real extra features that Tcl could benefit from?
I feel I should say the diplomatic "but Perl has it's uses" right now, but I just can't think what those uses might be... built-in source obfuscation might be of some use in the commercial world, I guess. :)