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A comment on Tcl Static Prime: experimental compiler for Tcl that produces C or Java code. Parent comment

Re:Tcl Static Prime: experimental compiler for Tcl that prod... by davidw on Tuesday July 28, 2015 @01:57PM (#9963326)
You can use upvar and uplevel to write control structures (if, while, that kind of thing) in Tcl itself. For instance, Tcl itself does not have a do ... while loop, but you can write one that will look like it's part of the language.

Also: it's Tcl, by the way, not TCL.

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Re:Tcl Static Prime: experimental compiler for Tcl that prod... by beagle3 on Tuesday July 28, 2015 @05:20PM (#9964560)
Lua has something called an "upvalue" but it's a completely different thing.

Lobster[0] also lets you write do/while loops and new conditionals, but does that in a different way that does not require upvar/uplevel, and is IMHO cleaner. (It is less capable in general, but captures 99% of the use cases that I've seen for upvar/uplevel in Tcl)

It is indeed Tcl, but it IS an acronym for "Tool Command Language", or at least started out that way.

[0] http://strlen.com/lobster

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Re:Tcl Static Prime: experimental compiler for Tcl that prod... by sigzero on Tuesday July 28, 2015 @05:44PM (#9964712)
The acronym is true but the community uses Tcl now and has for quite a while.
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Re:Tcl Static Prime: experimental compiler for Tcl that prod... by amyjess on Tuesday July 28, 2015 @06:05PM (#9964860)
Stuff like this intrigues me, from a linguistic perspective.

I'm really curious what lead to the community settling on this. You'll occasionally see all-lowercase in some projects thanks to the fact that *nix commands are usually all-lowercase, but title-casing an acronym is weird.

If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say it's because "Tcl" is typically pronounced as a word ("tickle"), so it got de-acronymized like "radar" or "scuba". Then again, nobody writes SCSI as Scsi. I'd love to study this some more...

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Re:Tcl Static Prime: experimental compiler for Tcl that prod... by davidw on Tuesday July 28, 2015 @06:25PM (#9964974)
My guess: it's kind of a fashion thing. FORTRAN and COBOL and FORTH and whatnot are a bit old fashioned looking.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortran#Naming

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