An Object-Oriented Tcl/Tk Binding for Interpreted Control of the NIST EXPRESS Toolkit in the NIST STEP Application Protocol Development Environment

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has built numerous software toolkits and applications for manipulating STEP and EXPRESS data. These toolkits are traditionally used as compiled libraries which are linked to other compiled modules. This paper describes a binding allowing the toolkit interfaces to be called from interpreted scripts. This significantly reduces the time required to construct and compile new applications. An X11 extension allows the construction of graphic elements, providing easy creation and integration of existing applications into X graphic user interfaces. We describe how the combination of bindings has been used to construct a STEP Application Protocol Development Environment.