MIT Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science

E E C S

Tcl: A Universal Scripting Language

John Ousterhout
Sun Microsystems Labs and University of California, Berkeley

Thursday, October 26, 1995
3:30 PM (3:15 refreshments)
Edgerton Hall, Room 34-101
LCS Distinguished Lecture

Abstract

In this talk I will argue that the most fruitful area for computer language design today is universal scripting languages. A universal scripting language is a language that can be used ubiquitously to create, extend, and compose applications at a very high level.

In the first half of the talk I will illustrate the benefits of a universal scripting language by describing Tcl and Tk. Tcl is a scripting language and Tk is a windowing toolkit based on Tcl. Together they allow new user interfaces to be developed an order of magnitude more easily than with other toolkits, and the resulting applications are substantially more powerful because of their use of Tcl.

In the second half of the talk I will describe the design issues for a universal scripting language, such as syntactic simplicity, extensibility, and interoperability with other languages such as C. I will show how these issues led to the design of the Tcl language and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of Tcl.

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Created: Sep 26, 1995 | Modified: Jun 25, 1997
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