Isthmus came into being when a group of students at Northeastern University discovered that writing interface code, between Demeter and TclTk was an arduous task. This code ended up taking large amounts of time to write, and was fairly repetitive. A consensus was formed that a tool could be designed which would generate this code automatically, and free programmers from this hassle. Isthmus is the result of that effort.
Tcl is an "extensible glueing language," which means that it is a command
language to which any application can add features. There are a number of
additional applications extending the Tcl command language. Tk is the most
obvious of these extensions, usually referred to as TclTk. However, there
are others, Dp , which stands for Distributed Processing
is another Tcl extension. What Isthmus does is create a new extension for Tcl.
This new extension includes the Demeter environment, and has been called
Tcl
. This extension has several benefits. It not only brings
TclTk functionality to Demeter, it also brings the adaptiveness of Demeter
to Tcl.
The combination of TclTk and C++ is a real implementation of an ideal adaptive object oriented scripting language. The current state-of-the-art for programming languages requires that we use two languages to get all the benefits that we would get from an ideal language.