Re:VFS shim that allows a SQLite database to be appended to ...
by convolvatron on Monday June 11, 2018 @12:22AM
(#17281769)
anyone interested in starting to play around with languages would do well to write out the 'everything is a string' version. its very short and understandable.
plus the result is really amenable to inclusion in another program as an extension language (tcl is too, but it has a much bigger footprint)
Also, virtually every type³ in Tcl can be expressed as a string, and so you can model the entire language mentally as if every value was in fact a string. If you wanted to write your own Tcl interpreter it would be pretty easy to actually implement it this way, though obviously performance would suffer quite a lot.
¹Later superseded by TIP 329 in response to the error options dictionary in Tcl 8.5.
²And FWIW I believe there's no actual spec for what error backtraces look like anyway, I think it's implementation-defined, though don't quote me on that.
³The only type I know of offhand that can't be expressed this way is an array (which is distinct from a list, that is a fundamental building block of Tcl and can absolutely be expressed as a string)