Still waters run deep

Growing up, once I was old enough to begin dating, I remember my Mom observing that "still waters run deep"...

* * *

In the spirit of trying to be a better Tcl Blogger I guess I should note that a comp.lang.tcl post I made last week was selected for this weeks Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL! (first time since June). Cameron Laird wrote:

Michael Cleverly lucidly exemplifies one of the ways Tcl can take your breath away, this time by providing a remarkably expressive framework for parsing data that has no apparent connection with the language.

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.tcl/browse...

More impressive, though, is that Michael and others give at least four alternative approaches to the parsing problem, all of which Melissa Schrumpf trumps with her expertise in TestStand.

My "lucid insight" was in observing that the file the original poster needed to parse could, with a handful of supporting [proc] definitions, be thought of as completely valid Tcl code which can be [source]'d.

* * *

I've heard people refer to Tcl as The Chameleon Language before. On the surface of it Tcl seems rather simple. After all, there are only eleven simple rules that define the entire language. Seems almost like a quaint toy in the face of real industry-strength enterprise-capable languages.

But such simplicity is tremendously powerful. Tcl, though simple, really is deep in the sense that my Mother talked about. One can mold the syntax of the language like clay and cast it to be whatever he wants.

That's why when I look at a DHCP server's leases database file I see ready-made Tcl code staring back at me. Life really is too short for syntax, so it makes sense to add some sugar and let Tcl do all the heavy lifting for us. Not only breath-taking, but tremendously liberating, once you see things this way...

—Michael A. Cleverly
Tuesday, November 15, 2005 at 19:47

Comment