pete@violet.berkeley.edu (Pete Goodeve) (07/02/90)
If anyone has been itching to play with Tcl -- in advance of the "official
release" (my apologies for forgetting the name of the person who's doing
it...) -- I have posted a demo (with sources) for anonymous ftp from
ucbvax. (I put it directly in the /pub directory -- probably should have
used Matt's /pub/amiga directory, but I forgot..)
It's in two parts (plus a descriptive README). One -- Tcl_Amiga.ZOO -- is
an executable and some docs; the other -- Tcl_Amiga_src.ZOO -- a complete
set of (Lattice compilable) sources -- mostly direct copies of the
unix/sprite originals. In particular, the docs are not complete (though
they should suffice for the demo). The current complete unix/sprite version,
with all docs, is tcl.tar.Z in the same directory, posted there by the
author. (The language was developed here at Berkeley, I assume you know.)
The demo has all the basic language facilities EXCEPT the unix-specific
file access commands, and external program execution. 'source' and
'print' do work, however, so you might be able to make it do useful
things. (The program is essentially the tclTest source provided in the
unix distribution, with a 'quit' command added.)
There's probably not much really significant to do with the demo, as it
lacks any ability to execute programs. I have played a bit with passing
commands to a CLI process which has 'IPC:' device "pipes" [not released
yet...(:-))] as std In and Out. This gives a fair amount of flexibility,
but is not exactly the simplest way of doing things. (Ordinary PIPE:s
aren't so suitable, because they block until the buffer is full or closed
[contrary to the manual!] and don't stay open.)
At any rate, if you're interested, it should give you a chance to
evaluate the language for yourself. [*I* rather like it.]
I didn't originally consider that I might release even such a minimal
package, but when I started looking at it it all went together so easily
that I couldn't resist. I don't want to step on any one's toes, though.
I'm sure to play with it some more, but I'll leave "real" versions to the
folks who started the topic. It won't be long, will it? (:-)).
-- Pete --