http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/~john/

I build software systems for large astronomical instrumentation at Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.

JBR in discussions

Reformed scripter, now Tcl'er...

When Tcl first came out, I thought it sucked, a rather slow interpreted language with square brackets for interpolation! I wrote my own lua/Xt binding marrying it to Wcl and the BAE Matrix. Tcl 8.0 and a little playing around and I've written tcl ever since, good riddance to all that unsupportable code.

The nicest Tcl I've written is the message library. This runs the MMT Observatory instruments and data acquisition systems [1]. All of the GUI code is Tcl, instrument control software is C. If I'd know better all the code would be Tcl with C (Critcl) extensions. There are several glue servers written in Tcl simply to handle protocol translation, very handy.

I wrote starbase which I use in the lab almost every day. There is a tcl API for starbase in pure tcl [starbase.tcl].

Tcl Things

• Numeric arrays in pure Tcl
• Canvas Structured Graphics
• sqlite3 full text search example
• modify a proc's behavior with a shim
• I wrote this thing for Using Perl to get Excel sheets from ascii
• I wrote procargs because I got tired of long long proc argument lists
• RS wrote a tiny htext hypertext help widget which I improve in htext2
• Beginning a tiny spreadsheet
• A different FORTH interpreter.
• ds9 image display
• Wikit page references as attributes
• ip-drop an adaptive firewall for linux
• cstat - distributed system status client/server
• Laying out widgets in a grid
• Writing DXF
• Talking to a Delta Tau PMAC
• TCP and recv
• Subst template expansion helpers
• Parsing Excel XLSX
• unsource - inline the content of "source" commands.
• parser-actions - generate Parser Tools action procs from peg grammer and template files.
• Playing ISBL - a little database query language
• Mavica 411 image conversion

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