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Also known as Tool Command Language
scripting language
Key facts
- Paradigm
- Multi-paradigm : event-driven , functional , imperative , object-oriented
- Designed by
- John Ousterhout
- Developer
- Tcl Core Team
- First appeared
- 1988 ; 38 years ago ( 1988 )
- Stable release
- 9.0.3 / 13 November 2025 ; 6 months ago ( 13 November 2025 )
- Typing discipline
- Dynamic typing , everything is a string
- Implementation language
- C , Tcl
- License
- BSD -style
- Filename extensions
- .tcl, .tbc
- Website
- www .tcl-lang .org
via Wikipedia infobox
~23 min read
Encyclopedic overview
Tcl (pronounced as an acronym, /ˈtɪk(ə)l/, like tickle, or as an initialism, /ˌtiːˌsiːˈɛl/, like T-C-L; originally Tool Command Language) is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. It was designed with the goal of being very simple but powerful. Tcl casts everything into the mold of a command, even programming constructs like variable assignment and procedure definition. Tcl supports multiple programming paradigms, including object-oriented, imperative, functional, and procedural styles.
It is commonly embedded into C applications for rapid prototyping, scripted applications, GUIs, and testing. Tcl interpreters are available for many operating systems, allowing Tcl code to run on a wide variety of systems. Because Tcl is a very compact language, it is used on embedded systems platforms, both in its full form and in several other small-footprint versions.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Tcl” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.