Hi All,
[snip]
>I am personally agnostic 'cause I've programmed in both languages.
>However, I have a few comments to make, followed by a question.
Before this degenerates into a holy flame war of scripting languages,
(oops too late :-), let me add my two cents also based on my experience
with these two scripting languages:
TCL
---
Pros:
* Known by many many people.
* Used within the EDA community.
* Supported on Linux/Unix, MacOS, and Win32 (even MinGW).
* Language well documented and how to embed a interpret is also well
documented. Many books on TCL/TK.
* Interpreters are encapsulated (you can have multiple interpreters
in a single process with minimal fuss).
* Easy access to TK.
Cons:
* The language syntax/functions never found a home in my head.
* I've written a few apps in TCL/TK and I always had to write
what seemed like a lot of code to get the simplest things done.
Certainly the necessary code for a particular task is less
than the comperable code in C, but more than say perl. IMHO.
Perhaps this is better nowadays and might be due to my
inexperience with TCL.
* ... more I'm sure, depending on your POV.
scheme (All of this is based around my experience with guile)
------
Pros:
* Lists are very natural match for netlist processing.
* guile provides a rich set of functions.
* I only had to write one or two gnetlist backends, the 24
additional backends were written by others. :)
* Easy to provide scheme interfaces to C functions.
Cons:
* guile takes over your program. I don't care for this much.
* I haven't found a way (or looked very hard) to have multiple guile
interpreters running in a single process.
* guile development is centered around Linux/Unix. Great for
Linux/Unix, but not so great for MinGW (which requires jumping
through some hoops to get compiling).
* The parts of the API will be deprecated soon. I will have to
do extra work to support newer releases of guile.
* scheme isn't exactly a mainstream language.
* People seem to fear ((((()))))'s. :)
Having just said all this, I like guile quite a bit. I haven't found a
suitable replacement. I even like TCL. However I will examine all of
my choices when I start a new project.
-Ales
