You know what, that is some pretty readable code.. COBOL might have been on to something there. I've gotten so used to syntax soup this is refreshing.
But tcl 7.x and before was a pure string-based language. Everything was essentially a eval(). People would hit syntax errors on production code.
Fun, painful times.
The flip side: the interpreter is super simple and fun to write.
There are under-the-hood optimisations to make it less insanely slow but that only affects performance.
Tcl is a cool hack (the interpret is simple to write) but it's insane to actually use it. I wish the EDA industry would realise that.
> Tcl automatically manages these values so their type is transparent to the Tcl script writer.
Internally in the main Tcl implementation, it isn't just strings. It's a bit cleverer so it can be faster. But that is completely invisible to the Tcl programmer.
JavaScript is not just strings. It has real types (even if it is happy to coerce them to strings at the drop of a hat).
To put it another way, JavaScript has `typeof` which returns the type of an object. Tcl doesn't have that because the answer would always be "string".
The stupid engineers could write the code like the grunts they are, and then the manager could read it and verify that it was correct without having to know how a program.
That wasn’t exactly how it was put. And there are obviously some assumptions in they are on how good a job a manager who doesn’t know how to code could ever do.
Certainly an interesting idea though.