Picol: A Tcl interpreter in 500 lines of code

Quite a few years ago, I was looking for a way to program microcontrollers via an onboard interpreted language, and happened on the picol code. I still have my version somewhere. It was delightfully straightforward and easy for an amateur to modify. So I first got it to compile on a Teensy, then added a REPL, floating point, and a few functions to do things like flip the GPIO bits and read the ADC.

Today of course there are things like CircuitPython, and I enjoy using it too, but it's such a beast that it's really impenetrable for someone at my skill level if I want to add low level functions.

Sadly it seems the blog post that was released in the past is no longer available, but the wayback machine has a copy

https://web.archive.org/web/20220303135439/https://oldblog.a...

That provides background about the constraints/limitations in this code.

Classic antirez. Does more in 500 LOC than most frameworks in 50k.

Related: https://github.com/antirez/aocla

best thing about TCL is easy syntax and that everything is a string :) Unique and simple and easy language with very slow changes.

Something like Python in good old days of 2.x before young internet javasceipt devs started pouring A LOT of new features to the language (feature creep).

Nowadays Python is so complex and flooded with ex C, C++, Java, JavaScript, Haskell programmers adding so many features, so fast that it's impossible to follow and understand them :(

Languages should not evolve on that rate. No time to master it :(

/rant

I remember we had users at a chip foundry who were super deep into TCL. Is it still used anywhere else? Would you use it for a new project if you for instance already knew Python or Lua?

Nice idea.

picol is ideal for writing other language, for example esotheric language

JimTCL has more features and it's almost as small.