scripting language newbie - compatibility

[Cameron Laird]

In article <8mrha1$olc$1 at newshost.accu.uu.nl>,
Martijn Faassen <m.faassen at vet.uu.nl> wrote:
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>in Smalltalk and Lisp. So, is my conclusion correct that Tcl's parser cannot
>figure out Tcl code because Tcl code can influence the way parsing works?
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Gosh, yes--or maybe no.  Tcl's parser knows nothing
about Tcl code.  That's a frequent complaint of Tcl
critics.  Individual Tcl commands can do all *kinds*
of things with the parsed stuff they receive.

Tcl developed carefully early on, and the core commands
are remarkably consistent.  That's purely a matter
of engineering discipline, though; the syntax allows
for most any kind of wildness.

'Couple of simple examples:  does [lreplace] act on
its argument, or does it return a new value (the
latter, but it often surprises the inexperienced)?
Why is a bunch of introspection organized as subcom-
mands within [info], but the list operations are
spread all over [list], [lappend], [lreplace], ...?
-- 

Cameron Laird <claird at NeoSoft.com>
Business:  http://www.Phaseit.net
Personal:  http://starbase.neosoft.com/~claird/home.html