Practical Programming in Tcl & Tk, Third Edition

Basic Concepts

This chapter assumes that you know some C or C++. You do not have to be an expert programmer to use the Tcl APIs. Indeed, one of Tcl's strengths is the ease with which you can extend it by writing C code. This chapter provides a few working examples that explain how to initialize your application and create Tcl commands. It describes how to organize your code into packages. It concludes with notes about compiling Tcl under UNIX, Windows, and Macintosh.

Getting Started

There are two ways to get started writing C code for Tcl applications. The easiest way is to write an extension that just adds some new commands to a standard Tcl shell like tclsh or wish. With this approach the Tcl shell creates a basic framework for you, and your ...