"Tcl cures 98.3% of all known simulation configuration problems"claims astonished researcher!
Richard A. Golding, Carl Staelin, Tim J. Sullivan, John Wilkes · 1994
We build detailed event-driven simulations of I/O systems as a way to earn a living, and use them to explore storage system architectures. Our major tool (the TickerTAIP simulator) is a large kit of parts that can be configured, combined, replicated, and connected in innumerable ways.Tcl lets us retain our sanity: it makes configuring the simulator a breeze compared to our prior techniques. In this paper we describe the general approach we adopted, and a few of the tricks and idioms we had to develop to make it work. Our approach and techniques should be useful to anybody using Tcl as a control language for a set of underlying objects. 1 The problem Our work exploring storage system architectures requires us to do lots of “what if … ” kinds of analyses, and for this we’ve chosen to use detailed event-driven simulation. The simulator we use, TickerTAIP, is based loosely on the one described in [Cao93] and [Ruemmler94].