> As an electronics engineer I use some very expensive EDA CAD tool > programs that are scriptable using Tcl. I was wondering why these > companies have choose to use Tcl instead of Python. Some of these > are: > > Mentor Graphics ModelTech VHDL and Verilog simulator > Synopsys Design Compiler and Primetime Static Timing Analyzer > ActelFPGA tools.
I suspect that it's due to historical reasons. TCL first appeared in 1988, whereas Python appeared in 1991. Some of these tools have been around for a very long time, and I suspect that, at first, it was mostly a question of picking the most popular scripting language; decisions made in recent years are probably more for convenience & backward-compatibility reasons than anything else. (That said, I'm not a huge fan of Python's lack of braces ... :) K. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
