BLooP vs. JavaScript vs. Tcl vs. ruffus Comparison Chart

Welcome to the Dictionary of Programming Languages, a compendium of computer coding methods assembled to provide information and aid your appreciation for computer science history. BLooP was a very simple recursive block structured language invented by Douglas Hofstadter for his book Godel, Escher, Bach. It features simple subroutine structure, very simple number and boolean handling, and recursion. The interesting aspect of BLooP was that it offered only bounded loop constructs, and was therefore incapable of expressing certain general recursive computations.

Tcl is a very simple programming language. If you have programmed before, you can learn enough to write interesting Tcl programs within a few hours. This page provides a quick overview of the main features of Tcl. After reading this you'll probably be able to start writing simple Tcl scripts on your own; however, we recommend that you consult one of the many available Tcl books for more complete information. Each Tcl command consists of one or more words separated by spaces. In this example there are four words: expr, 20, +, and 10. The first word is the name of a command and the other words are arguments to that command. All Tcl commands consist of words, but different commands treat their arguments differently. The expr command treats all of its arguments together as an arithmetic expression, computes the result of that expression, and returns the result as a string. In the expr command the division into words isn't significant.