Re: Favorite SW for vocab drills?

Bill <ws21@xxxxxxxxxxx> dixit:
>In article <d6qqf6$kh$1$8302bc10@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
> "Paul Blay" <NotCheckingEmail@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> Well if you'd paid attention Louise's post was in reply to
>> Jim's about JBDRILL (http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/jbdrill/).

>Sorry, sloppy reply. I meant to direct the question to Jim.

I thought it was directed to me, in an oblique sort of way.

>> At which web page Tcl/Tk is mentioned about five times
>> starting with "First, you must have a working version of Tcl/Tk 8.0
>> or later on your computer" and shortly followed by "Windows and
>> Macintosh users will probably have to download and install it, e.g.
>> from http://aspn.activestate.com/ or http://www.tcl.tk/ "

>Wonderfully circular. Following that link produces many pages that
>already assume you know what Tcl/Tk is, and none that say *what* it is.
>Also several 404s and a page for a company called Tcl-Tk that sells
>batteries.

Funny, I don't get either the 404s or the batteries.

Anyway, since Bill's grumblings about Tcl/Tk are the first in the 3 years
or so that JBDrill has been around, I have to conclude that other people
are either more aware of Tcl/Tk, or capable of following a link and
learning a little. Just in case there are untapped Bills out there, I
have added a few instructive words about Tcl/Tk to the JBDrill page.

>I do gather, however, that Tcl is a programming language especially
>designed for handling strings, which sort of makes sense, although I've
>nevr had much trouble handling strings in Basic, Pascal, C or C++。

The reason I used Tcl/Tk was not Tcl's string handling, but Tk's
spiffy window/button/etc. handling.

>Don't you just hate it when you go to one of those McDonald's where they
>don't let you go through the drive-through until you install GPS in your
>car?

Well, to make the analogy with JBDrill work, both the hamburgers and
the GPS system would have to be free. I suspect I wouldn't hate it
at all.

(It is possible to make Tcl/Tk apps which run without full Tcl/Tk
installations. It involves wrapping the Tcl up in a driver program
[usually C] and having the interpreter/libraries in a binary library.
I have done this with both Linux and Windows for other applications
but I didn't think JBDrill was worth the hassle. The DLLs for Tcl and
Tk are about 1Mb each.)
--
Jim Breen http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/
Computer Science & Software Engineering,
Monash University, VIC 3800, Australia
ジム・ブリーン@モナシュ大学
.