This. In fact it seems like plenty of hardware-eng tools use Tcl, and looking at all alternatives it's not a bad choice.

With Tcl you get something like a Lisp with a flexible consistent syntax, but less brainy and more pragmatic, and designed to drive other tools.

My impression many years ago was that it’s really not that bad. I got up and running writing simple programs immediately, and wouldn’t have tried to go outside its capabilities as a simple scripting language.

Thanks for the reply.