Re: Python vs. Tcl?

[Theodore C. Belding]

Hi-
If you're referring to my email, Tcl was designed as a control language for
C languages, so it's trivial to embed a Tcl interpreter in your program and
control it using user-defined Tcl procedures that actually call parts of
your program, and use Tcl as a general scripting language for it.  I
haven't looked to see whether this is just as easy in Python; it may well
be.  As you say, you can use Tk from Python; you can also apparently use
Expect from Python, though I haven't looked at the details.

As far as Drone goes, the only reason we needed to use Expect was to script
interactive applications like telnet and ftp, as well as remote commands
executed over a telnet connection.  If we didn't need to do things on a
remote host, we could have used pretty any scripting language (sh, Perl,
Python, Tcl,...).  And in fact if we wanted to use rsh, etc., instead of
telnet and ftp, we wouldn't have needed Expect at all.  I've found rsh,
etc. to be very non-portable, though, and shell programming is just plain
nasty.  Perl also has some features for automating interactive programs
such as ftp, though not as many as Expect, and of course you can use Tk
from Perl.

For anybody who's interested, 2 books just came out on Python, one
published by O'Reilly and another on using Python for Internet scripting,
co-authored by Guido van Rossum, Python's creator.
-Ted

At 7:26 PM -0600 10/29/96, Jason L. Asbahr wrote:
>Hi!
>
>Not to start another language debate, but any thoughts on
>using Python as the scripting language?  There are already
>ObjC-Python interfaces in place (ftp://ftp.thoughtport.com/...),
>it's arguably easier to read, and it has more datatypes than
>string.  It also interfaces to Tcl/Tk reasonably well (people
>coding in python often use Tk for UI), so it wouldn't necessarily
>mean ripping out any old code.
>
>The source for all Python knowledge is http://www.python.org,
>including a nice paper from the Alice project comparing Python
>and Tcl as scripting languages for their VR project.
>
>Cheers,
>
>Jason Asbahr                    808 Sul Ross  Suite 7
>Reactive Systems                Houston, Texas  77006
>address@hidden              (713) 942-7937  voice


--
Ted Belding                      <mailto:address@hidden>
University of Michigan Program for the Study of Complex Systems
<http://www-personal.engin.umich.edu/~streak/>