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From: jmunkki@hila.hut.fi (Juri Munkki)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: TCL or not
Summary: Use TCL: you'll avoid 'learning time' bugs
Keywords: TCL
Message-ID: <1990Nov19.111845.9232@santra.uucp>
Date: 19 Nov 90 11:18:45 GMT
References: <1990Nov19.033226.28411@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
Sender: news@santra.uucp (Cnews - USENET news system)
Reply-To: jmunkki@hila.hut.fi (Juri Munkki)
Organization: Helsinki University of Technology, FINLAND
Lines: 34

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.  TCL seems to be very complicated
>(every subclass has to interact with so many other things).  It seems
>that writing a simple program is complicated, but writing a
>complicated program will eventually be easier (than without TCL).

I haven't programmed with TCL, but I've read the manuals and the next
project that is suitable for TCL will be written with TCL.

What are you going to use, if you don't use TCL? I guess you'll have to
use the toolbox directly. It takes quite a long time to learn how to
use the toolbox, so if you haven't programmed the Mac before, it will
probably require more work than starting with TCL.

Even though TCL handles a lot of toolbox stuff, you will eventually have
to learn to use the toolbox too.

I learned Macintosh programming with MacForth (in 1984). It enforced its
own ideas about windows, menus and especially dialogs. (no dialog window
support!)  It took me quite a while to get used to programming in C, but
I like the total control that it gives me over the Macintosh. Having a
(buggy) kernel someone else wrote running UI things limited things quite
a lot.

From what I understand, TCL doesn't have serious bugs and since you get
source code for it, you can always fix anything you don't like. This is
why TCL is different from the interfaces that MacForth and Mach (another
Forth implementation on the Mac) offered.

   ____________________________________________________________________________
  / Juri Munkki	    /  Helsinki University of Technology   /  Wind  / Project /
 / jmunkki@hut.fi  /  Computing Center Macintosh Support  /  Surf  /  STORM  /
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