Forums Feature Suggestions support for TCL scripting

I don`t want to learn mirc scripting because imho it`s kinda waste of time to learn a language exclusive for an proprietary windows irc client.

Tcl is very easy to learn (more easy then mirc script), easy to implement, free and open source and already used by many platforms such as eggdrop and x-chat which are related to irc too.

I think things like this have been requested many times before. I don't think it's likely to ever happen.

Regards,

Even if it would happen. I won't use it myself. the mIRC language isn't a waste of time, above of that the scripts has no limit with the mIRC language. even though; I convert the mIRC to do certain things instead of making it C++"ed". mIRC language really helped me at my work!

I would like to see that too, i think it's easyer to write a Tcl, i wrote a whole botnet script befor, and i must say it's more tricky to write for mirc, Tcl is more self spoken language, mirc have allot of things that are hard to understand, atlest they are for me.

Did not know that this has been discussed. I searched for all thread titles with *tcl*.

If mirc script is a strong language... Couldn`t some micr script pro implement tcl thought mirc scripting? Like a third party project.

Not entirely, but sure, some great third party project could exist that would help people more familiar with TCL. However, where is the demand? If there's only a couple of people interested then knowledgeable people aren't going to bother putting the effort in - which is fair enough.

When I said it had been requested before, I wasn't purely referring to TCL but the introduction of other programming language support in mIRC in general. Some other clients support Python/Perl/Jscript etc. but I don't think mIRC ever will. That's just my opinion though, I don't think Khaled has ever given his opinion about this issue.

Regards,

I belive i have seen something like that on the net befor, dunno what site it was on tho. And since you have script out there that use Tcl it must be somewhere.

Adding native TCL support to mIRC would require Khaled to completely rewrite mIRC from just above the most basic level. Every command in the mIRC script language are designed specifically for mIRC's features.

I've tried using xChat's perl interface and in my opinion it was clunky and difficult. If you used TCL (or perl or python etc) in mIRC it would simply be a foreign programming language with a plugin to allow it to read and modify mIRC's internal values.

Now that I think about this, Khaled could add a feature that allows developers build programming language addons that can actively control mIRC (not through ordinary dlls). There could be a dialog to load external language interfaces. mIRC could then send a standard event/raw message to the external interfaces and it would be up to the interfaces to parse them.

Personally, I wouldn't have any use for this feature, but it may be useful to some.

-genius_at_work

It would not require such drastic changes to mirc itself at all, you final paragraph is more along the lines of would be required (at least as far as just parsing signals off to the alternate engine).

However i believe it would require some significant tweaking/additions to the tcl engine itself. Just like eggdrops, xchat, ioftpd, and others, the tcl engine would need to be modified both to add event triggering and well as the ability to pull information from mirc internal identifiers (for more complex ones this would require its own interpreter to check and redirect identifier/variable calls from a tcl-like syntax).

It would instantly create a significant increase in effort to maintain the scriptability of mirc. I dont think its a good idea to implement it in a way similar to other clients.

However, something like what genius_at_work suggested could be quite useful. The ability to attach external scripting engines and a way for mirc to call a procedure/function and catch/retrieve the information. This could certain expand the the scripting engine by allowing scripters to offload something that mirc can not natively do or handle well but other scripting languages can (such as arrays).