The easiest way to think about Tcl is simply, "it's a Lisp, but with strings instead of lists." It turns out that when you make a language like that, you end u

The easiest way to think about Tcl is simply, "it's a Lisp, but with strings instead of lists." It turns out that when you make a language like that, you end up something where your code looks and feels like a list of commands (much like a shell script) but is also capable of doing "real" programming stuff where needed without much pain. The test suite for SQLite is (still!) written in Tcl, I think partly for this reason. You probably wouldn't want to write a test suite in bash, but you don't quite get that feeling of "it's just a list of commands."