On Saturday 14 December 2002 15:49, KirkIsrael@xxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> There's a prefectly terrific Perl/Tk library these days...
> Isn't Tk the juice that gives Tcl its GUIs?? If so, I'd strongly
> recommend it, it's what my wrapper to Blint/ launcher of DASM
> that I'm working on is in.
Getting Perl/Tk (or Perl with any other graphical toolkit) to work with the
Perl compiler is an incredible pain in the ass. In fact, I don't believe
I've ever seen it work at all (it always requires the user to still install
some Perl libraries on his machine and by no means fits on a floppy.) If
people don't want to install Perl to run a patch to get a game, I'd just as
soon give them something really stand-alone.
> Do you think Tcl compiles to smaller than Perl, is that what you're
> getting at?
Neither Perl nor Tcl compiles to native code; they both work by embedding the
interpreter and the scripts/libraries/modules into one big file. Tcl's
interpreter is about a quarter the size of Perl's and Tk is linked in.
Getting external libraries to work with it is just as much of a pain but
since the GUI is in there already you really don't need to.
I had to write an asset inventory program for a very large client last year
and one of the requirements was that it run from floppy with no writing to
the hard disk at all (this was under Windows.) After trying about 8
different languages, Tcl turned out to be the only one that fit all those
requirements. I don't like it very much at all, but for certain narrow
applications it has advantages over everything else. This patch program I'm
talking about is one such app.
Sorry for the topic drift. If you'd like more of my thoughts about Tcl I put
a page up earlier this year about it:
http://www.kudla.org/raindog/tcl/
Rob
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