yes, indeed :). There is about forty years of programming language
history that new programming languages should draw on. Sadly this is
not done often enough by anyone. TCL in particular seems to have
dropped out of the sky from some other planet -- this is why people
who don't like Lisp like to say that TCL was "clearly influenced by
lisp" and also why this claim always pisses off former Lisp fans like
myself.
[I better cut off this line of reasoning before I get in even more
trouble. TCL is really interesting and useful for small scripts, but I
think it has very important limitations not shared by, eg, Python or
Perl or Scheme or Common Lisp....]
If you are looking for "easy to remember, write, read, extend, modify"
and possibly eventually "rewrite to C" you have simply no better
choice IMHO than Python, partially because it draws heavily on the
wisdom of the grand tradition of programming languages
(Pascal/ABC/Modula3, C/C++, Lisp/Smalltalk, and even Awk/Perl/ksh and
a bit from FP) in a cleaner, more practical, and more neatly packaged
way than anything I've ever seen. If you have an open mind on the
topic and want further thoughts and even some cute demo scripts
etcetera, I'll be happy to discuss this further offline.
To paraphrase a quote about Rousseau "Guido invented nothing, but he
infused everything with fire!"
Aaron Watters
Department of Computer and Information Sciences
New Jersey Institute of Technology
University Heights
Newark, NJ 07102
phone (201)596-2666
fax (201)596-5777
home phone (908)545-3367
email: aaron@vienna.njit.edu
====
"He's a humble man -- and with good reason!"
-- Winston Churchill, on a colleague