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   mcc (mcc@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 11-Feb-2025 03:25:51 JST mcc

   #BabelOfCode 2024
   Week 5
   Language: TCL

   Confidence level: Medium high

   PREV WEEK: https://mastodon.social/@mcc/113906616486081430
   RULES: https://mastodon.social/@mcc/113676228091546556

   TCL is an odd language. I think anyone who's tried developing a programming language has probably at some point thought "what if I just didn't bother with types and did all operations as string transformations?". I think TCL is just that language.

   Officially, TCL is supposed to be capitalized "Tcl". I will not be complying.

   • Embed this notice
     mcc (mcc@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 11-Feb-2025 03:25:48 JST mcc

     in reply to

     Answers to the above questions per #tcl on libera:

     - Type compatibility in tcl can be tested with [string is …]. "Actual" (interpreter level) type is apparently not exposed. https://www.tcl-lang.org/man/tcl8.6/TclCmd/string.htm#M10

     - Strings can be concatenated with [string cat …].

     - Arrays are "weird"; they live in a single scope and can't be exported or passed to a function except by breaking things with "upvar". Additionally, dicts are ordered. "arrays" feel like an old version of "dicts" and I think I intend to avoid them

   • Embed this notice
     mcc (mcc@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 11-Feb-2025 03:25:48 JST mcc

     in reply to

     My TCL notes file:

     {} => ""
     [] => ``
     set x y => x = y
     [expr {…}] => "act like a programming language"
     [eval {…}] => {act like ""}
     $ and [] work within "" but not {}
     eq ne in ni
     einter => coerce
     proc parameter named "args" is variadic if last
     first $ in $$a does nothing
     format => sprintf
     lsearch and regexp are different
     for {} {} {} => for(;;)
     [subst $$a] => dereference $a
     [string is …] => typecheck
     strings are not strings

     Before running:
     sudo apt install rlwrap
     alias tclrl='rlwrap tclsh'

     Augusto Campos repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     mcc (mcc@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 11-Feb-2025 03:25:48 JST mcc

     in reply to

     I have just written my first TCL program in an hour or two after waking up. I regret to report I found it a very enjoyable experience. "boogerman" from the FPGA discord wins once again. Unlike the very start-and-stop experiences I had with FORTRAN and Forth (due to bad ergonomics and docs), ASM (due to its basic nature) and BASIC (due to both) I found I just *wrote code*; the way to proceed was always obvious. And my final code was terse, despite a complex algorithm including a BFS graph search.

   • Embed this notice
     mcc (mcc@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 11-Feb-2025 03:25:49 JST mcc

     in reply to

     https://mastodon.social/@mcc/113975863804082731

     https://mastodon.sdf.org/@sgeo/113975867549675273

     Currently terrified by the possibility that at some point I will wind up writing a TCL linter

   • Embed this notice
     mcc (mcc@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 11-Feb-2025 03:25:49 JST mcc

     in reply to

     The official TCL tutorial actually contains a section named "More Quoting Hell"

   • Embed this notice
     mcc (mcc@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 11-Feb-2025 03:25:49 JST mcc

     in reply to

     Okay. I actually was able to get through the TCL docs very quick. I would have got through it even quicker if I occasionally hadn't had to stop and do something else for a while because something pissed me off.

     I am tempted to call this an "elegant" spec. I think I would actively like this language if the syntax were restricted somewhat for safety (e.g. if {} were *required* for things such as expr, if, for instead of "you can leave them out but then it probably does something horribly wrong").

   • Embed this notice
     mcc (mcc@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 11-Feb-2025 03:25:49 JST mcc

     in reply to

     Here are my TCL questions:

     - I see that there are "integer", "wide integer", "float", "list" and string types in TCL. Is there a builtin that can discern which type a variable has and/or discern which type[s] a variable can be coerced to?

     - Is there a string concatenation operator? (besides "$a$b").

     - What is the difference between an array¹ and a dict? The tutorial makes it clear both exist and explain the difference very poorly.

     ¹ This refers to an associative array not a list

   • Embed this notice
     mcc (mcc@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 11-Feb-2025 03:25:50 JST mcc

     in reply to

     The fact I'm picking the languages in this project slightly independently of the problems may be leading to poor pairings (I don't know what problems are coming up, so it's hard to make a schedule that maps well). I think what I most wanted to try with TCL was complex string manipulation. But AOC2024 day 5 appears to be asking me to implement… some sort of sorting algorithm? An auto-sorting data structure? This may turn out to be hell in the exact way trying to do file input in FORTRAN was hell.

   • Embed this notice
     mcc (mcc@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 11-Feb-2025 03:25:50 JST mcc

     in reply to

     Oh… … I don't like this. I really don't like this.

     (The thing I don't like is that {}, which you might want to use instead of quotes due to the balancing feature, also disable interpolation. There aren't a lot of language design concepts I got out of Perl that I still think are good ideas, but the one I still strongly believe is that every language needs easy-to-use balanced quote delineators. `qq` is the best thing in Perl.)

   • Embed this notice
     mcc (mcc@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 11-Feb-2025 03:25:50 JST mcc

     in reply to

     I have a programming language I was implementing for a while in the 00s named Emily. There were three versions of it, two of which got released, and all three passed through a phase in their development where they were basically "curried LISP without parentheses".

     Every time I get exposed to Tcl, I become more convinced that "curried LISP without parentheses" as the whole concept for a minimal-size-interpreter language is actually a super good idea. (TCL isn't this.)

     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMZsc3cvwKs

   • Embed this notice
     mcc (mcc@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 11-Feb-2025 03:25:50 JST mcc

     in reply to

     *makes a noise as if she were being strangled by her own throat*

   • Embed this notice
     mcc (mcc@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 11-Feb-2025 03:25:51 JST mcc

     in reply to

     I have near zero experience with TCL. In the late 90s when I started using Linux it was already considered old; I had one program that used it, a Tk-based AOL Instant Messenger client that was, admittedly, the nicest piece of Linux GUI software I had.

     TCL is almost gone today EXCEPT in the Verilog community, which uses it religiously because it's a single language they can use both for build scripts (because it's designed as a scripting language) and as a template language (it can do that too).

   • Embed this notice
     Augusto Campos (augustocc@social.br-linux.org)'s status on Tuesday, 11-Feb-2025 03:29:30 JST Augusto Campos

     in reply to

     @mcc I miss my TCL days. It was the language of choice for extending the functionality of 'eggdrop’, a popular (in its niche, and late-90s) IRC bot.

     As a language for extending other softwares, I feel that TCL was succeeded by Lua, a language created here in Brazil. Do you intend to test it too?

   • Embed this notice
     mcc (mcc@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 11-Feb-2025 03:42:32 JST mcc

     in reply to

     • Augusto Campos

     @augustocc The rules of the challenge are to only use languages I haven't used before, and I have written a *lot* of Lua, lol (I released like… five to fifteen games using it in the early 2010s, and then spent five years writing it professionally 2018-2023?). I use it less and less due to the lack of a viable typechecker (there's two typecheckers, neither of which *exactly* fit my needs) but I think Lua might literally be my favorite programming language, possibly even above the one I designed.

   • Embed this notice
     Augusto Campos (augustocc@social.br-linux.org)'s status on Tuesday, 11-Feb-2025 03:42:32 JST Augusto Campos

     in reply to

     @mcc oh, I am so sorry, I didn't connect the dots and hadn't realized that I was addressing the creator of Emily. Keep on rocking!

   • Embed this notice
     mcc (mcc@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 11-Feb-2025 03:46:01 JST mcc

     in reply to

     • Augusto Campos

     @augustocc You've actually heard of Emily?! Well, I'm flattered

   • Embed this notice
     Augusto Campos (augustocc@social.br-linux.org)'s status on Tuesday, 11-Feb-2025 03:46:01 JST Augusto Campos

     in reply to

     @mcc Yep. As I said, keep on rocking!

   • Embed this notice
     Mauricio Teixeira 🇧🇷🇺🇲 (badnetmask@hachyderm.io)'s status on Tuesday, 11-Feb-2025 04:00:58 JST Mauricio Teixeira 🇧🇷🇺🇲

     in reply to

     • Augusto Campos

     @mcc @augustocc
     wow! I haven't thought about or read TCL code in decades. Thanks for that walk down memory lane!