Re: gEDA-user: Gdatabase and datadraw available for download

[Svenn Are Bjerkem <svenn@bjerkem.de>]

On Monday 27 October 2003 23:43, Dan McMahill wrote:
> I'd probably vote for scheme.  For those of use who use cadence, scheme
> isn't too bad.  Also for anyone hacks on gnetlist, they're already
> exposed to guile and TCL may be yet another thing to learn.

Those of us who have to work with cadence have learned to fear lisp as a 
general language. Your argument could have been valid if Cadence cared to 
follow the lisp syntax, but they have invented their own infix syntax to make 
it look more like C. 

I have license to a program from Concept GmbH called Spicevision, which is a 
spice netlist visualizer. It is written in Tcl somehow and the database 
interface on the command line is pure Tcl. I think the command line of a Tcl 
interpreter is more easy to understand than the one in perl or CIW (Cadence) 

The structure of the command with options etc. make it look more like working 
on the commandline of a unix shell, which make it easier to remember things 
from session to session. 2 weeks away from hacking SKILL (Cadence) and I 
forget about everything.

Another tool using perl as internal language is Undertow. Even if I know perl 
as well as I know Tcl, I was not able to browse the internal database as 
quick as I was possible to do with Tcl.

Don't forget that Tcl was made to control CAD tools by a guy who also wrote 
CAD tools. (John Ousterhout also wrote magic, which at beginning also was 
using scheme. Now Timothy Edwards has implemented a tcl interface.)
-- 
Svenn