Call Different Interpreter For Tcl In Python

I wish to run a Tcl script with a different interpreter (OpenSees) from python itself, similar to

Solution 1:

It depends on how OpenSees is built and what options it offers.

Typically programs that embed Tcl have two main options how to do it, quite similar to Python.

Variant one is to have a normal C/C++ main program and link to the Tcl library, in effect the same thing tclsh does, a shell that can execute Tcl commands and providing extra commands statically.

Variant two is using a normal tclsh and just loading some extension modules to add the functionality. If that is the case, you can often simply load the package in the tkinter shell if they are similar enough, and are done.

OpenSees seems to be a program that implements variant one, a bigwish that includes some extra commands not available outside. So you cannot load the code directly in a tkinter shell.

You have three options:

1. Use something like the Tcllib comm package to communicate between Tkinter and the OpenSees shell (see Running TCL code (on an existing TCL shell) from Python for an example)
2. Run opensees via subprocess and implement some kind of communication protocol to send your commands.
3. Hack at the OpenSees code to build it as a loadable package for Tcl and load it into your tkinter process (might be hard).

Solution 2:

Solved it with a oneliner:

subprocess.call('Opensees elastic-1dof-spectrum.tcl', shell=True)