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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

Actually since Tcl 8 that is no longer true, yet it keeps being repeated as such.

http://www.tcl.tk/software/tcltk/8.0.html

TclTk was great, but it also teached me never again to rely on languages without JIT or AOT available on their toolchains.

Rewriting Tcl functions into C code was a routine task.

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I recall when we were porting our site to tcl 8 that one of our devs was giggling uncontrollably when he announced in our morning meeting that he'd created a test environment to shake out any bugs in the upcoming tcl 8.

Environment name: testtcl

Yeah, but that just changed internally, in the language everything is still a string.

A better way to phrase it (..even before tcl 8) is that everything can be TREATED like a string.

Numbers arent being converted to and from strings, things like sockets/files arent strings (their handles are though!)

Right. I think the one great feature it shapes with Lisp is, that everything has a textual representation. That means, all types of values can be presented as text and can be recreated from a textual representation. For Lisp, it is S-Expressions, which can be printed and read, for TCL it is the syntax which can be printed as strings and interpreting strings as data.

>I think the one great feature it shapes with Lisp is, that everything has a textual representation.

Is this true even for procedures? I was recently playing around with Scheme and was disappointed that once a procedure is defined, it got internalized and didn't have a textual representation other than #<proc> or the like.

In TCL, procedure signatures and bodies are stored within the runtime. You could essentially dump the entire state to a TCL file.

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