Quite a few years ago, I was looking for a way to program microcontrollers via an onboard interpreted language, and happened on the picol code. I still have my version somewhere. It was delightfully straightforward and easy for an amateur to modify. So I first got it to compile on a Teensy, then added a REPL, floating point, and a few functions to do things like flip the GPIO bits and read the ADC.
Today of course there are things like CircuitPython, and I enjoy using it too, but it's such a beast that it's really impenetrable for someone at my skill level if I want to add low level functions.
Sadly it seems the blog post that was released in the past is no longer available, but the wayback machine has a copy
https://web.archive.org/web/20220303135439/https://oldblog.a...
That provides background about the constraints/limitations in this code.
Restored. Recently I migrated all my stuff into a new server and missed to migrate the /pages of the old blog. Thanks.
Classic antirez. Does more in 500 LOC than most frameworks in 50k.
Yes. His work is really inspiring, eg. the text editor less than 1000 lines, tiny language in less than 1000 lines etc. When I read this on HN, I converted his text editor to my hobby programming language [1] (330 lines), and then wrote a chess engine with terminal UI [2] (400 lines), Tetris clone [3] in 140 lines. I also have a QR code generator and parser [4] (700 lines, still in Java only), a PDF generator (200 lines), and now also a tiny programming language [5].
[1] https://github.com/thomasmueller/bau-lang/blob/main/src/test... [2] https://github.com/thomasmueller/bau-lang/blob/main/src/test... [3] https://github.com/thomasmueller/bau-lang/blob/main/src/test... [4] https://github.com/thomasmueller/bau-lang/blob/main/src/test... [5] https://thomasmueller.github.io/bau-lang/at.html
Related: https://github.com/antirez/aocla
I remember we had users at a chip foundry who were super deep into TCL. Is it still used anywhere else? Would you use it for a new project if you for instance already knew Python or Lua?
I like tcl as an alternative to shell for any non-trivial scripts.
And its coroutines + built in event loop makes for really nice seamless async style programming.
Antirez (the author of this interpreter) uses it for the Redis test suite.
Personally, I know Lua and Python very well but I still used TCL a few years ago for something very specific: using ODBC on Windows. I gave more details on the Lua mailing list here: http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2021-01/msg00067.html
That was interesting to read. So in your case it came down to ecosystem depth, especially on Windows - where there was a TCL solution to talk ODBC, but the equivalent Lua functionality had issues on Windows.
By the way, I'm guessing that Tcl was (is?) big in EDA because John Ousterhout also wrote the EDA tool Magic.
It is at the core of the SQLite test suite and also a first-class citizen in interfacing to it.
It's still the lingua-franca of ASIC/FPGA/Simulation, especially for scripting the tools.
I think it's slowly being replaced there by Python, but it's very slow.
It is still used for operations procedures in, at least, European space industry. E.g., in mission control systems from Terma (CCS5 and TSC).
We've got Check Point Firewalls at work, and during updates I see lots of .tcl in the web UI.
Tcl/Tk to this day is the best tool to make GUI frontends for CLI applications. Besides that, in the past I used it in production for intranet database entry applications. It has since been replaced by Flask. In my opinion the higher complexity of the Flask version is no way justified and we should have kept the much simpler ~2k LOC Tcl/Tk solution.
What is the best and easiest to install binary distribution?
I was looking into this for v9 and gave up on finding a binary which was:
- easily found
- agreed upon as the one to use
- available for and easy to install on all three platforms
Should I look again?
In the 1990s, entire GUI applications would be written in Tcl/Tk -- not just the frontend -- the entire thing.
>Tcl/Tk to this day is the best tool to make GUI frontends for CLI applications.
Why? Please elaborate. I've heard others say this, but would like to know more.
>Besides that, in the past I used it in production for intranet database entry applications.
GUI apps?
> Why?
CLI applications typically read text from stdin and write text to stdout. The tcl model of "everything is a string" makes exactly the right abstraction to create GUI frontends for CLI applications rapidly and keep them simple at the same time.
I'm looking to use TCL for an embedded platform, as the scripting shell. Its simplicity and small size is key, as is its easy integration with C.
best thing about TCL is easy syntax and that everything is a string :) Unique and simple and easy language with very slow changes.
Something like Python in good old days of 2.x before young internet javasceipt devs started pouring A LOT of new features to the language (feature creep).
Nowadays Python is so complex and flooded with ex C, C++, Java, JavaScript, Haskell programmers adding so many features, so fast that it's impossible to follow and understand them :(
Languages should not evolve on that rate. No time to master it :(
/rant
Tcl has stopped being everything a string with the release of Tcl 8.0 and bytecode engine.
> In earlier versions of Tcl, strings were used as a universal representation; in Tcl 8.0 strings are replaced with Tcl_Obj structures ("objects") that can hold both a string value and an internal form such as a binary integer or compiled bytecodes.
http://www.ira.inaf.it/Computing/manuals/tcl/man-8.0/Changes...
I remember this quite well, because as part of the core team tasked with writing native C extensions, the migration to Tcl 8 had quite an impact on our code.
I learned Python with version 1.6, and have a few O'Reilley books proving the point the language wasn't really that simple, those that never bothered reading the reference manuals end-to-end though it was.
There's certainly something to be said for stable, uncomplicated and minimalist tooling that wont evolve out from under you and leave you with something that won't just-work five years from now.
I guess that's why Tcl is so popular in the EDA arena. I can stick some custom JTAG tooling in a Cyclone II design and talk to it by Tcl-scripting the 15-year-old software - and be confident that the same code (both in the FPGA and on the host computer) would work with the latest software and a current device.
Having said that, Tcl's not entirely free of compatibility and fragmentation frustrations: I sometimes wish that OpenOCD used full-fat Tcl rather than JimTcl, just so that I could make use of Tk. Being able to plot a histogram of data collected from the FPGA or make clickable buttons to trigger events is very useful.
I agree, so much for the benevolent dictator idea.
That's certainly a take...
> best thing about TCL is easy syntax and that everything is a string :)
What? That's the worst thing about TCL.
I love it. Living proof that languages doesn't need forced types.
Data is Data. It's kinda object programming as visioned in the 70".
So easy and trivial language.
> Living proof that languages doesn't need forced types.
The opposite surely? TCL is practically dead, and only lingers on in the EDA industry (which has zero taste). Virtually every successful language today has at least a few different basic types for numbers, arrays, strings, maps and so on.
Tcl has these types as well. They are special strings.
Number: string of digits. List: strings separated by space. Dictionary: key value pairs in a list.
It depends on the use case. For instance you open a socket, write there any value you have without serialization, read it in the other side, data transfer done.
The convenience of not having to marshal data over a network is certainly a use case. But I'll admit that two of the worst programs I ever saw were written in Perl and TCL. Somehow just a big jumble of inscrutable regexes.
When "everything is a string" then you have no choice but to literally treat everything as a string. Painful. Very cool project though.
That sounds more like someone who over-uses regexes - the developer is the problem, not the language
TCL has a lot of options for manipulating strings - take a look at just the built in string command for a start: https://www.tcl-lang.org/man/tcl8.4/TclCmd/string.htm
I have seen terrible code in Python, C, and more.
It's only the interface that is of a string. An array is a list of strings with space between, but only for the programmer. The runtime is free to use an actual array.
I'm aware. It's awful because of the implications for the programmer, not the runtime.
JimTCL has more features and it's almost as small.
You probably know but others might not: they have the same author.
Yep, but Jim has been maintainer over and expanded.
Altough the SDL2 bindings are very alpha.
haha golden comment