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Practical Programming in Tcl & Tk, Third Edition
By Brent B. Welch

Table of Contents
Chapter 1.  Tcl Fundamentals


Tcl uses the pound character, #, for comments. Unlike in many other languages, the # must occur at the beginning of a command. A # that occurs elsewhere is not treated specially. An easy trick to append a comment to the end of a command is to precede the # with a semicolon to terminate the previous command:

 # Here are some parameters set rate 7.0    ;# The interest rate set months 60   ;# The loan term 

One subtle effect to watch for is that a backslash effectively continues a comment line onto the next line of the script. In addition, a semicolon inside a comment is not significant. Only a newline terminates comments:

 # Here is the start of a Tcl comment \ and some more of it; still in the comment 

The behavior of a backslash in comments is pretty obscure, but it can be exploited as shown in Example 2-3 on page 27.

A surprising property of Tcl comments is that curly braces inside comments are still counted for the purposes of finding matching brackets. I think the motivation for this mis-feature was to keep the original Tcl parser simpler. However, it means that the following will not work as expected to comment out an alternate version of an if expression:

 # if {boolean expression1} { if {boolean expression2} {      some commands } 

The previous sequence results in an extra left curly brace, and probably a complaint about a missing close brace at the end of your script! A technique I use to comment out large chunks of code is to put the code inside an if block that will never execute:

 if {0} { unused code here } 

       
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    Practical Programming in Tcl and Tk
    Practical Programming in Tcl and Tk (4th Edition)
    ISBN: 0130385603
    EAN: 2147483647
    Year: 1999
    Pages: 478

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