Atdict is an experiment to create Tcl dictionaries that behave somewhat similarly to Javascript objects: keys can be accessed using "." notation and methods are assigned to keys.
Create a dictionary:
set myobj [@]
Assign a value to a key:
@ myobj.name = "Fred"
Assign the value of an expression to a key:
@ myobj.name := {$x + $y}
Retrieving the value of a key:
puts [@ myobj.name]
Define a method on the object:
@ myobj.greeting -> {who} { puts "Hello, $who!" }
Calling a method:
@ myobj.greeting: "World"
Methods have access to the dictionary via the "this" variable:
@ myobj.double -> {key} {
@ this.$key := {2*[@ this.$key]}
}
Methods are implemented as lambda expressions and executed using
apply.
At present, atdict doesn't handle nested dictionaries, though it easily could:
@ myobj.record.first = "Joe"
And of course it could all be faster, and error handling could be better.
It would of course be much faster if it were implemented in C; and it could be even better if it were a new Tcl syntax:
@myobj.greeting: "World"