The Use of Tcl

HATE is written entirely in Tcl, John Ousterhout's Tool Command Language. This means that a little familiarity with Tcl is needed in order to devise test scripts or to interface Tcl to your own programs; this is not difficult to acquire. Tcl is easy to read, most of its commands being English-like. There are several reasons for the choice of Tcl.

A number of people have asked why HATE is not written in Java. The simple answer is that Java is not as well-suited to writing this type of program as is Tcl, and that people who are not familiar with Tcl can learn enough to be able to construct test scripts in a couple of hours. Java also lacks built-in facilities for things like regular expressions, which are useful in writing interface scripts to pre-existing programs. Don't just believe me though, look at a discussion of which language is best for what by Ousterhout himself. (Don't assume from this that I have something against Java: I haven't, and use it all the time for low-level programming. It's just that it's not appropriate for this type of job.)


Adrian F. Clark
VASE Laboratory
Electronic Systems Engineering
University of Essex
Wivenhoe Park, Colchester, CO4 3SQ, UK
Email: alien@essex.ac.uk