Robin Becker wrote:
> Funnily enough they kept telling me that as soon as I switched to
> F99/C++ etc etc that everything would be portable.

Your confusion is in thinking that "portable" is a binary value. Fortran
was certainly more portable than assembler, as was C. Tcl is certainly
more portable than Fortran or C. 

The other problem, of course, is that people keep improving their
capabilities, so what was portable is no longer adequate. Fortran is
quite portable, as long as you don't want to do 3D graphics driven by a
data glove.

As long as you don't want to do development in multiple languages or
dynamically load code safely over the net into some other OS process,
Tcl and Python are pretty good choices. Otherwise, you might want to
consider C# or Java. 

See how it works? :-)