Version 9 of Visual Basic

Updated 2005-09-05 05:39:41

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http://msdn.microsoft.com/vbasic/

A surprising number of people automate VB applications with Tcl.

TclBridge greatly eases work with VB.


kennykb writes on comp.lang.tcl:

Perhaps the best head-to-head comparison of Tcl and VB in the context of adding GUI to a legacy engineering application was written by no less a light than Brian Kernighan (co-inventor of C, among his multitude accomplishments). You can find it at: http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/tcl95/kernighan.html

And Marty Backe replies:

The postscript version [of the article above] is > 11 MB. I've created a pdf version of it (~200KB) that can be gotten from here: http://www.lucidway.org/Marty/Tcl/Docs/kernighan.pdf

HJG 2005-08-30 This page asks for username & password

AMG 2005-09-02 Mirror! http://ioioio.net/tcl/kernighan.pdf . Thanks Marty for emailing me your copy; I will host it for you and everybody.


A nice Cheat Sheet for moving from VB6 to Tcl here: http://sourceforge.net/docman/display_doc.php?docid=11951&group_id=10894 RS: Hm, interesting.. but even on A4-Landscape, I can't print it decently...

LES: if that is still useful to anyone (two years later!), here [L1 ] is a remodeled page, and here [L2 ] is this remodeled page in PDF.


WJP Also, butt-ugly. There's a very nice comparison of Tcl with VB in Brian Kernighan's paper Experience with Tcl/Tk for Scientific and Engineering Visualization [L3 ] That's about as definitive as you can get. (In case you were wondering, Tcl wins.)

EKB I read Kernighan's paper with interest. It's really nice (although woefully out of date by now). It gives a balanced appraisal of several languages. But I don't think it's correct to say that "Tcl wins" out of the VB/Tcl comparison. Kernighan's own summary:

 As a rough summary, for the specific  purposes  I  have
 used  it  for,  Visual  Basic  is  significantly better than
 Tcl/Tk for the purely visual part (creating the interface on
 the  screen  and  having  it look somewhat like a commercial
 product), worse for programming, and  extremely  unsatisfac-
 tory  for  interprocess  communication.  Each is the easiest
 interface-building tool in its native environment.

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