Poet: An OOP Extension to Tcl Supporting Constraints, Persistence, and End-User Modification

Poet (Prototype Object Extension for Tcl) extends the Tcl language with objects featuring dynamic, prototype-based inheritance, persistence, and one-way constraints between object attributes. Poet includes wrappers around the Tk and BWidget widgets that are automatically generated using introspection. This paper also describes Poetics (Poet Integrated Construction Set), a sub-project within Poet to create tools to allow a Poet application's code and user interface to be modified by the end-user, from within a running Poet application. The goal of Poetics is to provide some of the functionality of an integrated development environment to the user of a Poet application. An object inspector and code editor are the beginnings of the Poetics toolset. Poet is an open-source project hosted at poet.sourceforge.net.