Tcl Tk Quick Start.pdf

Tcl/Tk quick start

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Table of Contents

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1. About this tutorial....................................................... 2

2. Tcl/Tk basics ............................................................ 4

3. The Tcl language....................................................... 6

4. Tk commands........................................................... 19

This tutorial is designed for those with experience

in one or more programming or scripting

languages. While Tcl/Tk is available on several

platforms, including Win32 and MacOS as well as

several of the *NIX environments, this tutorial is

written in the context of running on a GNU/Linux

installation.

Starting out, I'll introduce Tcl/Tk and summarize a

small part of the language's history. Then, I'll

review key features of the Tcl/Tk scripting

Finally, I'll wrap up with a presentation of some

external resources, both Web and print, to help you

deeper into the Tcl/Tk environment.

About the author

Brian Bilbrey is a system administrator, product

engineer, webmaster, and author. Linux is a tool in

his daily work as well as his avocation, much to the

chagrin of his long-suffering spouse, Marcia.

He welcomes your feedback on this tutorial or

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Presented by developerWorks, your source for great tutorials

Tcl stands for Tool Command Language. Tk is the

Graphical Toolkit extension of Tcl, providing a

variety of standard GUI interface items to facilitate

rapid, high-level application development.

tee-kay", began in 1988 by John K. Ousterhout

(shown in the image), then a Professor at U.C.

Berkeley (UCB). Tcl was designed with the specific

goals of extensibility, a shallow learning curve, and

ease of embedding. Tk development began in

the language, currently in version 8.3.2 stable and

8.4 development, as of this writing.

Tools and files

There are two main programs that you need on your Linux system to explore Tcl/Tk. These are

used to provide execution context for a shell script. Wish is the equivalent, for a windowed GUI

environment.

Check for the presence of these files by typing the following:

own copy. Of course, the absence of these programs on your system is not indicative of any

problem. Unlike Perl, Tcl/Tk is generally not regarded as essential to the operation of Linux.

Every distribution I'm aware of ships with a version of Tcl/Tk and the most popular extensions

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