from a posting on news:comp.lang.tcl by Paul Duffin (much more of his thoughts is on http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~fellowsd/tcl/future.html ):
Syntactically / Semantically
Conceptually
Community
I/O
GUI
Threading
Internationalization
Error handling
WHD wrote in the comp.lang.tcl newsgroup on 2002-11-19:
It came to me in a flash this weekend: The Tcl Way is the relentless exploitation of ambiguity.
Examples:
The answer to both of these questions is "All of the above."
It seems to me that the secret of the Tcl way lies in creating strings whose overt meaning is inherently ambiguous--and exploiting that ambiguity without mercy.
20nov02 jcw - That sounds more sneaky than need be, IMO. It's really highly "natural":
We tend to deal with things in exactly the same way in real life. A word can be an item and the start of a list depending on context only. We don't change the way we write down things when switching from one to many "items" (well, actually we do add hints, many people start to "bulletize").
In other words, words have multiple meanings, but even whether something is a list is often determined from context. No one would consider this sentence a list. But:
No one would consider this sentence a list
... looks much more like an enumeration, all of a sudden.
See also The Tao of Tcl