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From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Subject: Re: Why you should not use Tcl
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Date: Tue, 27 Sep 1994 20:26:45 GMT
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In article <367307$1un@engnews2.Eng.Sun.COM> ouster@tcl.eng.sun.com (John Ousterhout) writes:

>I think that Stallman's objections to Tcl may stem largely from one
>aspect of Tcl's design that he either doesn't understand or doesn't
>agree with.  This is the proposition that you should use *two* languages
>for a large software system:  one, such as C or C++, for manipulating the
>complex internal data structures where performance is key, and another,
>such as Tcl, for writing small-ish scripts that tie together the C pieces
>and are used for extensions.  For the Tcl scripts, ease of learning,
>ease of programming and ease of glue-ing are more important than
>performance or facilities for complex data structures and algorithms.
>I think these two programming environments are so different that it
>will be hard for a single language to work well in both.  For example,
>you don't see many people using C (or even Lisp) as a command language,
>even though both of these languages work well for lower-level programming.

I don't know about Stallman, but I (a) don't disagree with using
two languages, but (b) would prefer a more general language than
Tcl as an extension or glue language.  

>Thus I designed Tcl to make it really easy to drop down into C or C++
>when you come across tasks that make more sense in a lower-level
>language. This way Tcl doesn't have to solve all of the world's
>problems.  Stallman appears to prefer an approach where a single
>language is used for everything, but I don't know of a successful
>instance of this approach.  Even Emacs uses substantial amounts of
>C internally, no?

Yes.  It looks like an example of your approach.  Indeed, I
think you're probably wrong about what Stallman's objections
to Tcl stem from.

-- jeff
