program-interpreter

Tcl/Tk and our Tcl/TkC build on top of it is an interpretativ working programming system.
Tcl/Tk itself is written in the programming language C.
Tcl as the programming language prepares for some often used very helpful functions otherwise difficult to be programmed. For an example these functionalities includes datastructures like lists, association arrays, graphs etc. as well as the possibility to calculate mathematic formulas on the fly. The later is very usefull inside our microCAD subsystem.
Tk on the other side is a special Tcl-addon for programming grafical user interfaces (GUI) with all known components of similar systems like MS-Windows or Mac OS. Primary Tk was develloped for UNIX systems running the X11-GUI.
Today Tcl/Tk based applications are running without changes from UNIX to MS or Mac computers. Therefore Tcl/Tk is a system fitting perfectly into heterogeneous system enviroments (eg. UNIX-servers and MS- or Mac frontends).
Some one may argue about low speed of interpreters compared to fully compiled programs. This is of very low importants in the case of Tcl/Tk, because:

· the Tcl-interpreter will compile the source on the fly on startup of an application
· the mentioned functionalities is hightly optimised for internal speed and robustness.