Re: TCL and Related Speech Server questions

[Haden Pike <haden.pike@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Has there been any serious thought to rewriting the protocol to make it 
easier on other languages?  For instance, writing to a socket instead of 
STDIN.  That's off the top of my head, so there may be problems with 
that approach that haven't occurred to me yet.
Haden

On 10/9/2013 11:46 AM, T. V. Raman wrote:
> Good question.  The choice of TCL  is mostly historical:  in
> 1995, there were three languages that were approximately equal in
> popularity, perl, python and tcl.
>
> TCL  had one advantage over perl and python; in 1995, it was a
> lot easier to bind TCL  to a native C library -- and I needed
> that to integrate support for the software DecTalk.
>
> 2. In 1995, TCL and Python had an advantage over perl -- and this
> is still true -- both languages trivially expose a
> read-eval-print loop -- so you  can essentially write a server script in
> those languages where each  server command is just a function,
> and the client e.g. emacspeak, can launch the script  and write
> to stdin (or later over a socket) to send commands to the server.
>
> Fast Forward to 2013:
>
> If I started fresh today, I would probably write it in Python --
> given that TCL  development has slowed down.  That said, TCL is
> still a good option because it is well supported in general.
>
> Note that because of the initial servers having been written in
> TCL, emacspeak writes to the server assuming it's talking to TCL,
> so the python or Java server script has to do a bit more work.
>
> If you want to study this further, look in module dtk-interp.el
> --- if it ever becomes necessary, one could write an alternative
> implementation of that module that makes it slightly easier on a
> python server
>
> Haden Pike writes:
>   > Hi all,
>   >
>   > I got into a discussion about Emacs and Emacspeak with a sighted
>   > classmate who saw me using AucTeX to read my Calculus assignment. She
>   > asked me later why the speech servers use TCL.  I didn't know and my
>   > best guess was that it was the best option at the time.  Is this the
>   > case, or are there advantages I'm not aware of?
>   >
>   > Thinking about it later, I was curious if TCL should still be used when
>   > writing a new speech server, or whether something like the mac server
>   > should be written where possible?
>   > Haden
>   >
>   >
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