Essex logo VASE logo

HATE: The Use of Tcl

HATE is written entirely in Tcl, John Ousterhout's Tool Command Language. This means that a little familiarity with Tcl is needed in order to devise test scripts or to interface Tcl to your own programs; this is not difficult to acquire. Tcl is easy to read, most of its commands being English-like. There are several reasons for the choice of Tcl.

A number of people have asked why HATE is not written in Java. The simple answer is that Java is not as well-suited to writing this type of program as is Tcl, and that people who are not familiar with Tcl can learn enough to be able to construct test scripts in a couple of hours. Java also lacks built-in facilities for things like regular expressions, which are useful in writing interface scripts to pre-existing programs. (Don't assume from this that I have something against Java: I haven't, and use it much of the time for low-level programming. It's just that it's not appropriate for this type of job.)