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My name is Camiel Plevier. 

At Dutch Space, Leiden, the Netherlands, in 2005 I worked on a test program for the Herschel and Planck satellite's attitude control system. The test scripts needed to be written in TCL 8.3. Several times the discussions on these pages helped me to work around the unnatural quirks of TCL. So I felt I had to contribute as well.
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[RS]: Welcome! But could you elaborate on what "unnatural quirks" you mean?

What someone regards as "unnatural quirks" is relative to his background and viewpoint. Any examples given by one person will be debated by others. My contributions to several pages should give a clue on my particular vantage point.

[LV] for me, at least, when a program language's operator/function/proc is described as performing a particular function, and doesn't raise an error when input provided would generate output that doesn't match the description, that would qualify as an "unnatural quirk".  For instance, in a hypothetical example that is not based on reality, if the description of "+" indicated what it did, and when using it I discovered that if I tried -13.47 + 1 and got an answer of -999.9 , then I would consider it at best an unnatural quirk, and more likely I would consider it a bug. 

Even if someone explained to me that on the particular hardware I was using, even the C programming language did the same thing, I would not consider that justification for the language to operate in the manner described. I would not even consider it justified if the reference and training materials specifically warned that providing that value would cause problems. I would, however, consider the language creator/maintainer to be doing an exceptional job if I discovered that, despite hardware and the underlying implementation language limitations, a language did what I "meant" when I performed a function such as that.

A good example in Tcl where it does what I mean is this:

===
 $ tclsh8.4
% expr 1<<31
-2147483648
% exit
srv29 (22390) $ tclsh8.6
% expr 1<<31
2147483648
===

Notice how that, in Tcl 8.6 (and probably 8.5), tcl does ''the right thing'' with regards to shifting a bit, even though if I tried to do this in C, using 32 bit integers, I would get the same result as Tcl 8.4 did ''in the olden days''.

There are other examples, in tcl, perl, etc. where language maintainers decided that making things work '''right''' was the better choice.


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