TCL and SCL

The SCL (Surpac Command Language) is an extension of a widely used scripting language known as TCL (Tool Command Language).

The quickest way to get started with TCL and the SCL extensions to TCL are to follow these links.

TCL was chosen as the basis for SCL for a number of very important reasons some of which are:

TCL is a very mature product that has very extensive capabilities and also very robust.
TCL is easy to use
TCL is free and many TCL resources are not only free but are readily accessible from the Internet.
TCL is very powerful
TCL is supported by and used by many organisations around the world.
Many very useful extensions to TCL have been developed by other parties around the world and are made freely available to the TCL user community.
There is a wealth of TCL reference material and TCL resources on the World Wide Web.
TCL does not require special compilers and importantly it runs on many different computer platforms

The main difference between Tcl and languages such as C, is that Tcl is an interpreted rather than a compiled language. Tcl programs are simply scripts consisting of Tcl commands that are processed by a Tcl interpreter at run time. One advantage that this offers is that Tcl programs can themselves generate Tcl scripts that can be evaluated at a later time. This can be useful, for example, when creating a graphical user interface with a command button that needs to perform different actions at different times.

TCL Resources

TCL is widely used for many different purposes in the computing and information technology industries. In these fields TCL is used for a wide variety of applications. Furthermore, TCL is used by many different organisations and with the huge cross section of free TCL resources, including training materials, TCL is an ideal tool to use for a scripting language.

The principal WWW site for TCL resources is the http://www.tcl.tk web site. From this page you can visit a number of interesting pages some of the more important ones being: