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Picol: A Tcl interpreter in 500 lines of code

127 points by tosh

by analog31

1 subcomments

Quite a few years ago, I was looking for a way to program microcontrollers via an onboard interpreted language, and happened on the picol code. I still have my version somewhere. It was delightfully straightforward and easy for an amateur to modify. So I first got it to compile on a Teensy, then added a REPL, floating point, and a few functions to do things like flip the GPIO bits and read the ADC.
Today of course there are things like CircuitPython, and I enjoy using it too, but it's such a beast that it's really impenetrable for someone at my skill level if I want to add low level functions.

by stevekemp

1 subcomments

Sadly it seems the blog post that was released in the past is no longer available, but the wayback machine has a copy
https://web.archive.org/web/20220303135439/https://oldblog.a...
That provides background about the constraints/limitations in this code.

by seyz

1 subcomments

by antirez

0 subcomment

by iberator

6 subcomments

best thing about TCL is easy syntax and that everything is a string :) Unique and simple and easy language with very slow changes.
Something like Python in good old days of 2.x before young internet javasceipt devs started pouring A LOT of new features to the language (feature creep).
Nowadays Python is so complex and flooded with ex C, C++, Java, JavaScript, Haskell programmers adding so many features, so fast that it's impossible to follow and understand them :(
Languages should not evolve on that rate. No time to master it :(
/rant

by JSR_FDED

13 subcomments

I remember we had users at a chip foundry who were super deep into TCL. Is it still used anywhere else? Would you use it for a new project if you for instance already knew Python or Lua?

by anthk

1 subcomments

by Western0

0 subcomment

Nice idea.
picol is ideal for writing other language, for example esotheric language