Tcl Instrument Drivers - v1.2 Fall 1994

• Complexity of instruments requires intelligent drivers. Need to set/read/check multiple variables per request.

  Also, new compiled versions of server a maintenance problem.

  Investigate interpreted languages for driver programming.

• DCL (shell) drivers too slow.

  Must use embedded interpreter.

• The Tcl language - embeddable, expandable and ported to VMS.

  Becomes the interpreter for instrument drivers, command-line interface commands and save files.

• All I/O now performed synchronously.
• Drivers loaded into memory at instrument addition to reduce overhead of interpreting.

  Speed not a problem compared with slow response of instruments.