“Increases in processor speed and memory sizes are making it
possible to incorporate scripting in embedded systems themselves.
This offers the potential of reducing deployment costs and allowing
a new class of value-added applications to be created for embedded
systems…”
“Tcl is a particularly simple and powerful example of a
scripting language. Essentially, it was created to serve as a
command language for applications. The goal was to incorporate Tcl
into an application and then combine the features of the
application with those of Tcl to form a command language. This
resulted in two key properties. First, Tcl is embeddable: Its
interpreter is a library package that can be linked into an
application. Second, Tcl is extensible: It provides a set of APIs
that can be used to create new features in the language…”
“The Tcl scripting language has several properties that suit
it for onboard use in embedded systems. The embeddable nature makes
it easy to incorporate into embedded systems: The Tcl library
package can simply be linked into the run-time system of the
device. Tcl’s extensibility makes it easy to expose selected
features of the device in the Tcl interpreter, and its APIs for
extension are comprehensive and well-documented and provide
considerable power to the extension writer.”