[mactropolis]

Hello, I was just curious as to why Apple includes the TCL toolkit in every installation of OS X? I am/was fimiliar with TCL back when I toyed with Linux, so I know what it is and what you can do.

Has Apple ported TCL to Quartz or something?

Also, the installation is of an older TCL (8.3), is it wise to download a later version of Tcl/Tk?

thanx

[Angus_D]

tcl doesn't have a UI, tk is the UI toolkit, and yes, Apple has just about ported tk to run on Aqua, but it depends on TCL/TK 8.4 so they're waiting until that's out of alpha before shipping it. See here: http://www.opensource.apple.com/bugs/X/Tcl/2781056.html

[Millennium]

Tcl is very nice for some things. It's particularly great for making human-readable config files (that's what it was made for, in fact), and it's also pretty good for making servers that you telnet into. Plus you get the awesome expect, though I don't think that has been ported to OSX yet.

Tk is really important, though. The reason is that Tcl isn't the only language that uses it for GUI's; Perl and Python can both use it too, as well as several others. So it gives GUI bindings to many more languages.

Granted, this could also be done via OSA, which could theoretically give these languages full access to Cocoa. But Tk is more portable, which is a plus for cross-platform apps as well as existing Unix-based Tk programs.

[Angus_D]

I think that there is a package for expect in Fink... Or there has been one submitted, or something like that

[mactropolis]

thanks for the info.

but _why_ does Apple want to include tcl in the first place is my question.their are a few other cool languages that i'd like to see pre-compiled and ready for DarwinPPC/OS X besides the usual (perl, phy, python,etc)

Any ideas?

[Amorph]

You can't use Tk by itself. It depends on Tcl for its runtime, and specifically for event handling. Even if you're doing your coding in Python, or Perl, and using Tk for the interface, you need Tcl in the background.

Besides, it's a popular scripting/RAD environment in the UNIX world. Why not include it?

[sadie]

expect?