4 ms·

Right, Tcl is the lingua franca of EDA tooling. People just expect that you can talk to it via Tcl. It's often the only way to automate design flows, so you bet

• ghettoimp 9y ago
  I didn't realize that this would come across as senseless bashing. My main complaints against TCL basically center around the everything-is-a-string mentality and the corresponding lack of type safety anywhere. A more minor objection is that I strongly dislike the syntax for numerous reasons, such as - Comments aren't like any other language and have numerous gotchas, e.g., you can't use mismatched {}s in a comment within a proc, - Whitespace is relevant in surprising ways, such as requiring Egyptian brackets for procs/ifs, and I constantly forget line continuations - Using foo for lvalues but $foo for rvalues, while sensible, is a constant source of typos... but, of course, you do get used to it. Mostly. But the comment thing really irks me. I will certainly agree that you can do worse. TCL is surely a fine alternative to awful shell languages (bash, C shell, etc.) But in the realm of dynamically typed scripting languages, I'd absolutely nominate Python or Ruby as a much more reasonable and sensible for your everyday programmer, and Lisp's S-expressions seem far more elegant if you insist on a unifying principle like everything-is-a-...