Tcl Scripting for EDA + Intro to Tk

Length: 3 days (24 Hours)

Course Description

Tcl has become the de facto standard embedded command language for Electronic Design Automation (EDA) applications. Whether you need to automate repetitive behavior, extend the functionality of an application, control multiple tools with a single script or create a custom GUI, Tcl is your best choice.

Learning Objectives

The first two days of this course provide a hands-on introduction to Tcl. It teaches fundamental concepts like variables and command substitution, globbing and Regular Expressions, files and process handling. It shows how to build applications relying on libraries and packages.

The optional third day covers an Introduction to Tk which allows a designer to create custom Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) on top of Tcl scripts and applications.

Prerequisites

• Familiarity with UNIX and some programming language

Course Agenda

Day 1 – Introduction to Tcl

• Overview
• Tcl Basics
  • Commands and variables
  • Substitution and evaluation
  • Mathematical operations
  • Procedures
• Control Flow
  • Conditional and looping commands
• Strings
  • Strings and string operations
  • Extracting information

Day 2

• Lists and Arrays
  • Using lists and arrays
  • List versus array
• File I/O & Program Access
  • Reading from and writing to files
  • Invoking external programs
  • Multi-process communication
• Regular Expressions (REs)
  • Regular expression patterns
  • String searching and replacement
• Advanced Tcl Scripting
  • Advanced procedures
  • Error handling
  • Date & time
  • Scheduling and delaying command execution
• Next Steps
• Appendix A: Turning Scripts into Applications
• Appendix B: Binary Files and Strings
• Appendix C: Client-Server Applications and Networking

Day 3 - Introduction to Tk

• Tcl/TK Basics ?
• Widget Overview
  • Label, Button, Entry, Listbox, Scrollbar, Scale, and Frame Widgets
• Geometry Managers Overview
  • Grid-Geometry manager
• Event Overview
  • X Server
  • Widget Receive Events
• Menu Bars Overview
  • Creating a Menu Bar and menu
  • Adding Menu shortcuts and tearoff
• Dialog Overview
  • Adding to and customizing a Toplevel Widget
  • Dialog Boxes
• Text Widget Overview
  • Text Displays

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