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Tcl and the Tk Toolkit, Second Edition
book

Tcl and the Tk Toolkit, Second Edition

by John K. Ousterhout, Ken Jones
September 2009
Intermediate to advanced
816 pages
19h 38m
English
Addison-Wesley Professional
Content preview from Tcl and the Tk Toolkit, Second Edition

32. Tcl Objects

In Tcl, all values can be treated as strings. Early versions of Tcl actually stored all values as strings, even numeric data types. This approach could be quite slow, especially for values that needed frequent conversion to binary formats, such as floating-point numbers.

In contrast, all modern versions of Tcl (ever since 8.0, released in 1997) store their data internally using a much more efficient form called Tcl objects. Tcl objects are values that have a string representation and a second “internal” representation of some other type, such as integer, double, list, or, in Tcl 8.5, dictionaries. Tcl uses objects internally for variable values, command arguments, command results, and scripts.

This dual nature of Tcl objects ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780321601766Purchase book