Chapter 1: Introduction to Tcl/Tk
HyperWorks 14.0 Introduction to HWD Customization 5
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Chapter 1
Introduction to Tcl/Tk
About TCL
Tcl (Tool Command Language) is used by developers worldwide and has become a
critical component in thousands of corporations. It has a simple and programmable
syntax and can be either used as a standalone application or embedded in application
programs. Best of all, Tcl is open source so it's completely free.
The main difference between Tcl and languages such as C is that Tcl is an interpreted
rather than a compiled language. Tcl programs are simply scripts consisting of Tcl
commands that are processed by a Tcl interpreter at run time. One advantage that this
offers is that Tcl programs can themselves generate Tcl scripts that can be evaluated at
a later time. This can be useful, for example, when creating a graphical user interface
with a command button that needs to perform different actions at different times.
One of Tcl's most useful features is its extensibility. If an application requires some
functionality not offered by standard Tcl, new Tcl commands can be implemented using
the C language, and integrated fairly easily. Since Tcl is so easy to extend, many people
have written extension packages for some common tasks, and made these freely
available on the Internet.
Businesses and engineering teams today are often faced with the problem of making
diverse collections of resources work together. We call these programming tasks
integration applications. For enterprises, the integration platform is becoming as
strategically important as the operating system and database platforms.
Tcl is the integration platform of choice because of its speed of use, breadth of
functionality, and enterprise-ready features such as thread-safety, internationalization
and cross platform deployment. The latest version of Tcl provides all the features an
enterprise needs for all integration and scripting needs.
