TCL – Control Flow

Dr. C. Prayline Rajabai

Assistant Professor Senior
School of Electronics Engineering
Vellore Institute of Technology
Overview
 Tcl’s control flow commands are similar to the control flow statements in the C programming language,

csh and perl script.

 Control flow statements in TCL include if, while, for, foreach, switch, and eval.

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 The if command
 The if command evaluates an expression, tests its result, and conditionally executes a script based on

the result.

 if command receives two arguments. First is an expression and the second is a Tcl script.

 if command can also include one or more elseif clauses with additional tests and scripts, plus a final

else clause with a script to evaluate if no test succeeds.

Example
if {$x < 0} {
...
} elseif {$x == 1} {
...
} else {
...
}
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Looping commands
 Tcl provides three commands for looping: while, for, and foreach.

 All these commands are similar to the perl script.

While Command :

 The while command takes two arguments: an expression and a Tcl script.

 It evaluates the expression and if the result is non-zero then it executes the Tcl script.

 This process repeats over and over until the expression evaluates to zero, at which point the while

command terminates and returns an empty string.

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Looping Commands
Example program to reverse the elements of a list:

set a [list x y z]

set b ""

set i [expr [llength $a] -1]

while {$i >= 0} {

lappend b [lindex $a $i]

incr i -1

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Looping Commands
For Command

 The for command is similar to while except that it provides more explicit loop control.

Example program to reverse the elements of a list using for command:

set a {w x y z}

set b ""

for {set i [expr [llength $a]-1]} {$i >= 0} {incr i -1} {

lappend b [lindex $a $i]

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Looping Commands
 The foreach command iterates over all of the elements of a list.

 Foreach takes three arguments. The first is the name of a variable, the second is a list, and the third is a

Tcl script that forms the body of the loop.

 Foreach will execute the body script once for each element of the list, in order.

 Before executing the body in each iteration, foreach sets the variable to hold the next element of the list.

Example (list reversal)

set a {w x y z}

set b "";

foreach i $a {

set b [linsert $b 0 $i]

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Loop control: break
 The break command causes the innermost enclosing looping command to terminate immediately.

(Similar to ‘last’ in perl)

Example:

suppose the list reversal example above it is desired to stop as soon as an element equal to a particular
value is found in the source list then we can use the break command.

set b "";

foreach i $a {

if {$i == "ZZZ"} break

set b [linsert $b 0 $i]

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Loop control: continue
 The continue command causes only the current iteration of the innermost loop to be terminated.

(Similar to ‘next’ in perl)

 The loop continues with its next iteration.

Example :

set b ""

foreach i $a {

if {$i == "ZZZ"} continue

set b [linsert $b 0 $i]

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switch command
 The switch command tests a value against a number of patterns and executes one of several

Tcl scripts depending on which pattern matched.

 The same effect as switch can be achieved with an if command that has lots of elseif clauses,

but switch provides a more compact encoding.

 Tcl’s switch command has two forms.

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 switch command
First form

switch $x {a {incr t1} b {incr t2} c {incr t3}}

 The first argument to switch is the value to be tested.

 The second argument is a list containing one or more pairs of elements.

 The first argument in each pair is a pattern to compare against the value.

 The second is a script to execute if the pattern matches.

 The switch command steps through these pairs in order.

 As soon as it finds a match it executes the corresponding script and returns the value of that script as its

value.

 If no pattern matches then no script is executed and returns an empty string.

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 Switch Command
Second Form :

 This form spreads the patterns and scripts into separate arguments.

switch $x a {incr t1} b {incr t2} c {incr t3}

 First form is preferable because you can easily spread the patterns and scripts across multiple lines

like this:

switch $x {

a {incr t1}

b {incr t2}

c {incr t3}

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Switch Command
 If a script in a switch command is “-” then switch uses the script for the next pattern instead.

Example :

switch $x {

a-

b-

c {incr t1}

d {incr t2}

This script increments variable t1 if x is a, b, or c and it increments t2 if x is d.

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 Eval Command
 Eval is a general-purpose building block for creating and executing Tcl scripts.

 It accepts any number of arguments, concatenates them together with separator spaces, and then

executes the result as a Tcl script.

 One use of eval is for generating commands, saving them in variables, and then later evaluating the

variables as Tcl scripts.

Example :

set cmd "set a 0"

...

eval $cmd

 In the above example variable a is set to 0 when the eval command is invoked.

 Perhaps the most important use for eval is to force another level of parsing.

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Eval Command
 The Tcl parser performs only one level of parsing and substitution when parsing a command.

 The results of one substitution are not reparsed for other substitutions.

 eval provides the mechanism to achieve this.

 Suppose a variable vars contains a list of variables and you wish to unset each of these variables then the

following script will not work.

unset $vars

 The solution is to use eval, as below

eval unset $vars

 Eval generates a string consisting of “unset ” followed by the list of variable names and then passes the string

to Tcl for evaluation.

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 Source command
 Source command reads a file and executes the contents of the file as a Tcl script.

 It takes a single argument that contains the name of the file.

Example :

source init.tcl

The above command will execute the contents of the file init.tcl.

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Exercise
 Write a program that asks the user for the outside temperature in degrees Celsius. Display the

equivalent in degrees Celsius. The conversion formula is:

F=32+9C/5
where F is degrees Fahrenheit and C is degrees Celsius. Then, if the temperature is going to be below
40F tell the user to take a coat. If the temperature is above 80F tell them to avoid sunburn. If it’s in
between, tell them it will be a great day!

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 Program
puts "Enter the temperature in celsius"

gets stdin c;

set f [expr (($c*9/5)+ 32)]

puts “$c degree Celsius is = $f degree Fahrenheit”

if {$f<40} {

puts "Temperature is very low. Please take a coat"

} elseif {$f>80} {

puts "Temperature is very hot. Don't go out.. Avoid sunburns"

} else {

puts "Have a great day!"

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Thank You…