(Ebook) Tcl and the Tk Toolkit by John Ousterhout, Ken Jones et al ISBN 9780321336330, 032133633X

(Ebook) Tcl and the Tk Toolkit by John Ousterhout, Ken Jones et al ISBN 9780321336330, 032133633X

Tcl was born of frustration. In the early 1980s my students and I developed a num-ber of interactive tools at the University of California at Berkeley, mostly for inte-grated circuit design, and we found ourselves spending a lot of time building badcommand languages. Each tool needed to have a command language of some sort,but our main interest was in the tool rather than its command language. We spentas little time as possible on the command language and always ended up with a lan-guage that was weak and quirky. Furthermore, the command language for one toolwas never quite right for the next tool, so we ended up building a new bad com-mand language for each tool. This became increasingly frustrating. In the fall of 1987 it occurred to me that the solution was to build a reusable com-mand language. If a general-purpose scripting language could be built as a C librarypackage, then perhaps it could be reused for many different purposes in many dif-ferent applications. Of course, the language would need to be extensible so that eachapplication could add its own specific features to the core provided by the library. Inthe spring of 1988 I decided to implement such a language, and the result was Tcl.Tk was also born of frustration. The basic idea for Tk arose in response to Apple'€™sannouncement of HyperCard in the fall of 1987. HyperCard generated tremendousexcitement because of the power of the system and the way in which it allowed manydifferent interactive elements to be scripted and work together. However, I was discour-aged. The HyperCard system had obviously taken a large development effort, and itseemed unlikely to me that a small group such as a university research projectcould ever mount such a massive effort. This suggested that we would not be able toparticipate in the development of new forms of interactive software in the future.