partcl

A from scratch implementation of Tcl on Parrot.

To build the tcl compiler, first build parrot and the parrot utilities. From the top level parrot directory:

 perl Configure.pl && make

Then, type make in this directory. This will generate the file tcl.pbc which can then be used to run tcl programs.

 ../../parrot tcl.pbc foo.tcl

You can also generate a faux-executable with make tclsh; You could then run examples with, e.g.:

 ./tclsh example/bench.tcl

Interactive tclsh

To run partcl interactively, simply run the faux-executable with no args:

 ./tclsh

or, similarly, the parrot bytecode: ../../parrot tcl.pbc

Command line options

partcl supports two command line options, neither of which are standard Tcl.

-e

Analagous to perl's -e switch, this option will let you specify tcl code in the command line, which will then be executed. e.g:

 $ ../../parrot tcl.pbc -e "puts {Hello World}"
 Hello World

You will need to properly quote the tcl to protect it from your shell.

--pir

Given this option, partcl will compile the tcl code to PIR, and output the PIR on STDOUT. This PIR can then be compiled to parrot bytecode, or run directly through parrot. (Works with -e.).

Examples

To run an example, change to the examples directory, and type make for instructions.

Test Suite

To run the test suite, type make test. If any tests fail, try TEST_PROG_ARGS=-G make test, which will disable parrot's garbage collection system. Send the results of both to the mailing list parrot-porters@perl.org.

To run the spec test suites, type make spectest; This will check out the tests from tcl's CVS repository for the 8.5.3 release and run them.

Note that the tests are fudged slightly to use our version of [test] As soon as we can run tcltest.tcl natively, we will.

Documentation

See docs/ and TODO