ewilsonmail@gmail.com wrote: > However, I would've thought that Brian Kernighan's comment would have > given some indication that Tcl is not simple. What I read just indicated that he found it "uncomfortable" to "internalize" Tcl's syntax. Given that he is half of the very definition of the C language, I don't think that's surprising. It's probably the very fact that "Tcl is simple" which caused him to need that much time to wrap his head around. He's got C-like syntax in his DNA, as it were, and it isn't easy to unlearn such ingrained things in order to get comfortable with Tcl's much simpler syntax. > It is clear that some think that Tcl is not difficult, just > unconventional... It's unconventional among powerful programming languages, granted. But compare it to a Unix command line, and the conventions can seem obvious. > To me "Tcl is simple" should mean easy to learn, write, read and > comprehend. If it is to mean merely the paucity of syntax than we may > as well just say that. Otherwise we are being disengenuous. In my experience, it *is* easy to learn, write, read, and comprehend. Nearly every example to the contrary is due to people expecting it to be much less easy than it is. But as soon as one recognizes that things like [if] are just commands, rather than part of the language's syntax, it all falls quickly into place.

At 2007-11-15 11:39AM, "tom.rmadilo" wrote: > On Nov 15, 8:00 am, "Donal K. Fellows" <donal.k.fell...@man.ac.uk> > wrote: > > The problem with this complaint is that it (largely) depends on > > something being "not there", and so that generating an informative > > error message would require knowing about code that hasn't been > > executed. [...] > TWS:can't find package abXdcE > while executing > "package require abXdcE" [... full trace ...] > > So the last [log Notice] was skipped because the error aborts sourcing > the file, you get a full trace of the error. No mystery here. I think the mystery from Larry's perspective is "why can't package abXdcE be found? I know it's there but I don't know precisely what it's name is." The fact that Tcl's catchable errors are very informative sheds no light there. -- Glenn Jackman "You can only be young once. But you can always be immature." -- Dave Barry