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From: minow@mountn.dec.com (Martin Minow)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: TCL or not
Keywords: TCL
Message-ID: <2031@mountn.dec.com>
Date: 19 Nov 90 17:26:31 GMT
References: <1990Nov19.033226.28411@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
Reply-To: minow@mountn.UUCP (Martin Minow)
Organization: Digital Equipment Corporation
Lines: 42

In article <1990Nov19.033226.28411@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
dmmg1176@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu (David M Marcovitz) writes:
>
>My impression is that TCL will be very useful in the long-run, but the
>startup time will be very long. ...
>My questions:
>(1) Am I right about TCL?

I would agree.  For me, the hardest part of TCL was getting enough courage
to actually start writing something.  I'm still thumbing through the
manual about every ten minutes.   It turned out to have a fairly high
threshold (i.e, getting a document/window/pane on the screen), but things
are much smoother now.

>(2) Is there something I can do to get moving quickly with TCL?

Jump in.  Take the sample editor application and make it do something
else (in fact, I'd recommend starting by *removing* anything resembling
scrolling and just use static panes and buttons and other simple stuff.

>(3) If I start writing a simple program without TCL, will I be able to
>    incorporate TCL into that program as I expand it?

If you carefully separate computation from user-interface, the computation
part will translate reasonably easily.  However, there are some TCL features
such as using the CLlist class and DoForEach to replace vectors and for-loops
that require some re-thinking.  I'd recommend biting the bullet and plunging
in, but documenting your code so you can re-target it when the next great
advance in computing theory comes along next month.

One significant advantage of TCL is that one might hope that the nice folks
at Think will worry about System 7's new features (such as Apple Events).
The System 7 beta CD had a patch kit for ThinkC that fixed some problems
with the debugger and added header files.

One thing I'd appreciate was a way to look at a class and see all of
the methods and variables it inherits.  I.e., to look at the documentation
for CList and see GetNumItems (which is in CCluster) -- that would cut
down the pain of dealing with the documentation.

Martin Minow
minow@bolt.enet.dec.com