Tcl

networking

Tool Command Language: a scripting language designed in 1988 to be embedded inside other people's programs, so that each tool would not invent a command language of its own.

Ousterhout built it out of frustration that every tool he encountered had grown its own half-designed scripting language, and he shipped it as a C library precisely so an application could gain a scripting layer without recompiling. That design decision determined where it ended up: Tcl is rarely the language you choose for a project and frequently the language you find inside a product you bought. It is the scripting layer of network test equipment, the language F5 iRules are written in, and, through Don Libes's Expect extension of 1990, the way a generation automated devices that only offered a terminal. Anyone who learned it to drive one vendor's tool has usually found it waiting inside another one years later.

Also known as: tool command language, tcl/tk, ousterhout

← All glossary entries