	University of California, Berkeley EECS Dept, CS Division
Jordan Smith	SLIDE: Scene Language for Interactive Dynamic Environments	Prof. Carlo H. Séquin

SLIDE Tcl Basics Tutorial

TCL

Basic TCL Expressions

TCL Math

A TCL math expression is written:
expr math
For example,
expr (30 * sin(100)) + $SLF_MOUSE_X
You can use any of the basic math operators: (+, -, *, /), as well as shift operators: (<<, >>), bit operators: (&, |), math functions: (sin, cos, tan, atan, asin, acos, atan2, exp, log). Pretty much any math you can do in C, you can do in TCL. The only thing that works much differently is arrays and array indexing, which uses lists.

This should be all you need to know to design a dynamic scene. If you want to explore all the power of TCL, you can use your own variables, functions, and even widgets, but simple mathematical expressions should be sufficient to create interesting behaviors in your SLIDE scene.

TCL Variables

You can create a variable or set the value of an existing variable with the set command:
set variable value
For example,
set x 30
When you want to get the value of a variable in an expression, prepend a "$" to the variable name. So $y gets the value of the variable y.
set z $y

Square brackets force evaluation of a statement, whereas curly braces pass the statement along unevaluated as a list, so
set y [expr 10 * 100]
gives the variable y the value 1000, whereas
set y {expr 10 * 100}
gives the variable y the list value {expr, 10, *, 100}.

TCL Lists (Vectors)

You can write a list of constant values with curly braces:
set v {1 2 3}
If your list contains an expression that needs to be evaluated, you need to use the list statement:
set v [list 1 2 [expr sin(30)]]
You can access individual members of a list with lindex (short for listindex), so with v defined as above:
lindex $v 0
has value 1, and
lindex $v 1
has value 2, and
lindex $v 2
has value sin(30) or 0.5.

Testing Your TCL Expressions

If you want to test out TCL expressions, run wish and type in TCL expressions at the command prompt. You may want to start out by defining those SLIDE variables that you will expect to find with some arbitrary value:


set SLF_TIME 1

set SLF_MOUSE_X 100

set SLF_MOUSE_Y 300

You can check the value of any variable with the command, puts (short for putstring).
puts $y
You can input a file of TCL commands with the source command:
source my_commands.tcl

This page was originally built by Jordan Smith.

Last modified: Saturday, 06-Feb-1999 23:50:03 PST