Why I still like tcl

As in many programming languages, tcl represents a moment in time as the number of seconds since some fixed point (typically January 1, 1970 00:00 GMT/UTC). From this one can create a more readable version with flexible format options. For example using the clock commands,

clock format [clock seconds] -format "%A %B %d, %Y %I:%M %p"

produces "Wednesday November 05, 2003 03:48 PM".

Today I was writing code to run only on Sunday. Again as with most languages, one of the format options is to represent the day of the week as an integer. Languages vary somewhat on this, sometimes Sunday=0 and sometimes Sunday=1. This is all well documented and good programmers will put helpful comments to remind future readers of their code.

Tcl has a very powerful command "clock scan" that lets you create new dates using a wide variety of date formats, e.g. "2003-11-05", "tomorrow", "2 days ago"... or "Sunday". So, rather than hoping that I properly remember that Sunday is 0 or 1, I did the following:

    set weekday [clock format [clock seconds] -format "%w"]
    set sunday [clock format [clock scan "Sunday"] -format "%w"]
    if {$weekday == $sunday} {
        puts "yes, it's Sunday"
    } else {
        puts "no, it isn't Sunday"
    }

Internally, tcl will turn [clock scan "Sunday"] into a date representing midnight next Sunday which is a reasonable guess as to what somebody would want. For my use here, I don't really care if it's last Sunday, next Sunday or Super Bowl Sunday. I just care that it's a Sunday.