Scripting languages have rapidly become the best way to code many applications, in some cases surpassing traditional languages like C. Among several prominent such languages, Perl stands out as perhaps the most popular. But Perl by itself has no graphical interface, making certain types of applications more difficult. Perl in combination with Tk, a graphical user interface toolkit, overcomes that weakness.

At the UUASC October meeting, member Mike Elliott of Sun Microsystems will give us an introduction to Perl/Tk. Tk has been closely associated with Tcl, another scripting language, but Mike will explain how it works with Perl. He'll cover platforms on which it runs, language independence, and why Tk should be used with Perl rather than Tcl. He'll also present a simple "hello world" application, a discussion of frames, and how the geometry manager works, in order to understand fundamental issues of layout organization.