Author: John Ousterhout Homepage: http://www.tcl.tk/ Family: ScriptLanguage Download: http://www.activestate.com/Products/ActiveTcl/ Platform: Windows, Mac OS/X, Linux, others License: Open source
Tool Control Language is a scripting language originally written by Dr. John Ousterhout, while a Professor of Computer Science at the University of California. John's graduate students were building a network operating system called Amoeba. While the students worked on the Amoeba core and utilities, John wrote a script language intended to be a glue for other programs.
Tcl was designed to be easily embeddable as a script language in applications. It is extensible, and you can create new Tcl commands from existing Tcl procedures, ala FORTH, or add commands as compiled C code called from libraries. It's also highly portable, and implementations exist for Windows, Mac OS/X, and various flavors of Unix/Linux?/BSD.
An early adopter of Tcl was Don Libes, of the National Institute of Science and Technology, who used Tcl to implement his popular Expect application to automate programs designed to be run interactively.
Subsequent to developing Tcl, John created Tk, a graphical widget framwork. Combined with Tcl, it became possible to write GUI applications in Tcl. Tk has also been integrated with the Perl and Python script languages.
Today, Tcl is maintained by a community, and implementations exist for many systems. The most popular distribution is probably that of ActiveState, who offers a free, open source community edition as well as supported commercial implementations and tools.