When comparing Ammonite Shell vs eltclsh, the Slant community recommends eltclsh for most people. In the question“What are the best Bash replacements?” eltclsh is ranked 11th while Ammonite Shell is ranked 14th. The most important reason people chose eltclsh is:
Tcl is a saner scripting language built on the same principle as the Unix shell (everything is a string) with more than a hint of Lisp. eltclsh makes it possible to use Tcl interactively with tab completion for both language constructs and file paths. The result is that you can develop a snippet of Tcl code interactively and then paste it in your script.
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Pros
Pro Powerful
Can call any 3rd party executable or use any Maven library.
Pro Easy to automate any task
When bash scripts start being complex, they can be converted to Ammonite.
Pro Tab completion
Pro Well documented
Pro A more consistent alternative to the POSIX shell
Tcl is a saner scripting language built on the same principle as the Unix shell (everything is a string) with more than a hint of Lisp. eltclsh makes it possible to use Tcl interactively with tab completion for both language constructs and file paths. The result is that you can develop a snippet of Tcl code interactively and then paste it in your script.
Pro TclVFS
TclVFS allows you access files inside ZIP archives or on remote HTTP and FTP servers like you would local files. If you put "package require vfs::urltype; vfs::urltype::Mount http"
in your ~/.eltclshrc you can do things like "file copy http://example.com/file /tmp/file" (HTTPS is currently not supported by TclVFS.)
Cons
Con Uses JVM and more memory than regular shells
Con Stability
eltclsh crashes on mismatched delimiters.