Newsgroups: comp.lang.tcl,comp.lang.scheme
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From: chen@cs.cornell.edu (Zewei (Wilfred) Chen)
Subject: Re: Critical review of Stk [Was: Why you should not use Tcl]
Message-ID: <1994Sep29.231709.20412@cs.cornell.edu>
Organization: Cornell Univ. CS Dept, Ithaca NY 14853
References: <9409232314.AA29957@mole.gnu.ai.mit.edu><3635a6$ang@apollo.west.oic.com> <CONNOLLY.94Sep28133053@austin2.hal.com> <36ejsb$ol9@taloa.unice.fr>
Date: Thu, 29 Sep 1994 23:17:09 GMT
Lines: 37
Xref: glinda.oz.cs.cmu.edu comp.lang.tcl:19676 comp.lang.scheme:10138

eg@kaolin.unice.fr (Erick Gallesio) writes:

>In article <CONNOLLY.94Sep28133053@austin2.hal.com>, connolly@hal.com (Dan Connolly) writes:
 
[portions of a long exchanges deleted]

>|> The question for me is: which facilitates the development of large
>|> bodies of reusable code, and which has large bodies of reusable code
>|> available for building applications? It appears that Tcl has more
>|> large bodies of reusable code (expect, tcl-dp), though I don't know
>|> how much of the scheme code out there in various archives is usable
>|> with STk.
>|> 
>This is really the question. 
>	- On the scheme part, the Aubrey Jaffer SLIB can be used and it
>contains a lot of interesting code. (SLIB can be used with STk since 2.1.2).

>	- On the C part, they are far less people which are interested 
>in STk than Tcl, and I must admit that the number of STk contributions cannot
>be compared with the Tcl one (even if I know some that some interesting
>STk extensions are developped for now). And the previous flame war shows 
>that people are not ready to pass to Scheme. So, even if I deplore it, it
>will be probably be the case for a moment. However, Stallman idea of a 2 
>syntaxes language (as Dylan and its implementation called Marlais) would
>probably permit to gain audience.
>However, pure Tk contrib (not Tcl ones), are most of the time easy to 
>include in STk since the FFI knows how to add new commands.

Have anyone thought about how difficult it is to (fully automatically)
translate Tcl into Scheme?  It seems to me that Tcl is a simple enough
language that this should be relatively easy.  I am asking partly in
the spirit of this general discussion, partly because I have some Tcl
code that I'd like to painlessly port to STk, to ease my future
efforts in maintenance and developement.

Zewei Chen

