[bottlepalm]

You know what, that is some pretty readable code.. COBOL might have been on to something there. I've gotten so used to syntax soup this is refreshing.

https://github.com/icitry/FPS.cob/blob/main/fps.cob

[ternaryoperator]

That readability is the upside of COBOL’s oft-assailed verbosity.

[MBCook]

I remember being taught in my COBOL class (early 2000s, needed an elective, thought it would be fun) that that was the point.

The stupid engineers could write the code like the grunts they are, and then the manager could read it and verify that it was correct without having to know how a program.

That wasn’t exactly how it was put. And there are obviously some assumptions in they are on how good a job a manager who doesn’t know how to code could ever do.

Certainly an interesting idea though.

[giraffe_lady]

I had to get into an old tcl program for work recently and had the same thought. I wouldn't necessarily pick it today but it was kind of nice in a way that's unfamiliar to me from modern development.

[moregrist]

The tcl syntax is fine. And modern tcl is fine.

But tcl 7.x and before was a pure string-based language. Everything was essentially a eval(). People would hit syntax errors on production code.

Fun, painful times.

The flip side: the interpreter is super simple and fun to write.

[IshKebab]

Tcl is still entirely stringly typed. That's never changed.

There are under-the-hood optimisations to make it less insanely slow but that only affects performance.

Tcl is a cool hack (the interpret is simple to write) but it's insane to actually use it. I wish the EDA industry would realise that.

[kevin_thibedeau]

Tcl 8 introduced dual-ported objects. Everything can exist as a typed object that is convertible back to a string in certain cases (some form of string operation typically). That plus the bytecode engine makes it work completely different than prior releases.

[IshKebab]

That's just a performance optimisation. It doesn't change the semantics at all. From the changelog:

> Tcl automatically manages these values so their type is transparent to the Tcl script writer.

https://www.tcl-lang.org/software/tcltk/whatsnew.tml

[kevin_thibedeau]

Saying it's "just strings" is disingenuous. You could make a js interpreter that uses strings internally too.