Tutorials

October 15 - 19, 2018

Crowne Plaza Houston River Oaks
Houston, Texas, USA
2712 Southwest Freeway, 77098
Phone: 1-713-5238448
Fax: 1-713-5771273


One of the best reasons to attend the Tcl conference is the tutorial track. These sessions are presented by Tcl experts - people who write the packages, write the books, and develop applications on a daily basis. They share their knowledge of Tcl/Tk and the practical experience in developing large, robust applications. Whether you're new to Tcl or experienced, these sessions will help you develop your projects more quickly.

Tutorial schedule

Morning Afternoon Evening
Monday Introduction to Tcl 1 Introduction to Tcl 2
Advanced Tcl: Quadcode Advanced Tcl with Raspberry Pi
Tuesday Advanced Tcl: New Tcl Features Using Critcl
Advanced Tcl: Namespaces and Packages Advanced Tcl: TclOO Intro

Tutorial Information

Advanced Tcl: New Tcl Features — Andreas Kupries

This tutorial provides an overview of features added to Tcl since 8.5 came out. This ranges from the simple like new list operations, to big ones like the expansion operator, TclOO, tailcalls, coroutines, etc.

Using Critcl — Andreas Kupries

Critcl makes it easy to merge C code into your Tcl application. This can be used to speed up compute intensive parts of an application, link Tcl with an external library, or just for fun.

The tutorial will explain the theory and details of using Critcl.

This is an upgraded successor to Steve Landers tutorial about the same topic, adding in all the new things Critcl got over the last few years.

Advanced Tcl: Namespaces and Packages — Clif Flynt

Required: Basic knowledge of Tcl

This session will describe how to modularize your scripts from simple procedures and the source command to using namespaces and packages as well as using upvar and uplevel to control access to data. The class will also cover techniques for separating GUI code from business-rule code including using the bind command and variable tracing, to bind actions to events. Examples include a Tower of Hanoi game and a Nuclear Reactor simulator.

Advanced Tcl: TclOO Intro — Clif Flynt

Required: Basic knowledge of Tcl

Tcl 8.6 makes TclOO the standard Object Oriented language for Tcl.

Clif will describe the basics of OO:

  • How to construct classes and objects
  • How/When to use inheritance, mixins
  • Object methods and object variables.
  • Class methods and class variables.
  • Class morphing

Introduction to Tcl 1 — Clif Flynt

Required: Knowledge of basic programming concepts. No previous experience with Tcl required.

This course gives you all the knowledge you need to produce useful Tcl scripts, as well serving as a framework for exploring more advanced features of Tcl. We'll explore basic Tcl syntax and commands, string processing, data structure manipulation, basic process interaction, and file handling.

Introduction to Tcl 2 — Clif Flynt

Required: Knowledge of basic programming concepts and very basic Tcl.

This course gives you all the knowledge you need to produce useful Tcl scripts, as well serving as a framework for exploring more advanced features of Tcl. We'll explore basic Tcl syntax and commands, string processing, data structure manipulation, basic process interaction, and file handling.

Advanced Tcl with Raspberry Pi — Gerald Lester

This tutorial will explore the use of Tcl on the PI, in particularly on the Raspbian operating system. We will cover what packages to install on the PI to make life programming with Tcl easier.

Since there are a large number of Python modules for use on the PI, this tutorial will cover the use of the pyman package to wrap Python libraries as TclOO classes and Tcl procedures. We'll also cover how to extend the generated wrapper classes.

We will explore how to use the PI for DIY projects around the house and also how to use Tcl on the PI for Edge computing.

Lastly, we will cover how to wrap your Tcl scripts to make a single executable that you distribute to other PIs.

This will be a lecture lab tutorial - you should bring you PI! Please bring devices to hook up to both GPIO pins and I2C (aka Twowire). A camera would also be nice.

Advanced Tcl: Quadcode — Sean Woods

This tutorial brings you right to the bleeding edge of Tcl development over into experimental research, the Tcl quadcode compiler.

Written by Kevin Kenny and Donal Fellows this compiler takes Tcl scripts and transforms them into native machine code, usable as a shared library.

This course covers how to develop applications which use Quadcode, as well as the basic care and feeding of Quadcode's LLVM environment.

Contact information

tclconference@googlegroups.com