Tcl-URL! - 1998/08/17

by Cameron Laird - 'DejaNews:'' [L1 ]

The struggle to be brief continues: as massive as these weekly summaries appear, they represent only a fraction of the ideas and news percolating in the Tcl world. As always, I welcome recommendations on where to set the boundary between what to include and what to leave aside.

• Scriptics' Beta 7 of TclPro supports HP-UX ("version 10"?), halves the size of compiled scripts, and rectifies several smaller faults (see [L2 ])
• Dr. SWIG, David Beazley, agrees to contribute his talents to the CS department of the University of Chicago http://www.cs.utah.edu/~beazley
• John Ousterhout released three valuable papers last month to which I'm only now drawing attention https://www.tcl-lang.org/scripting/choose.html https://www.tcl-lang.org/scripting/scriptHistory.html https://www.tcl-lang.org/scripting/tclHistory.html
• Bryan Oakley nicely analyzes a GUI motif of tabs mediated by a listbox, (see [L3 ]) while George Howlett succinctly advertises BLT's tabset for many of the same purposes (see [L4 ]) Bryan also explains what it takes to "page" through a sequence of displays (see [L5 ])
• Larry Virden recalls Tcl/Tk's roots as an *alternative* to the so-often-sought Integrated Development Environment (IDE) (see [L6 ]) Among the recommendations Larry (implicitly) makes there are ftp://www.tcl.tk/pub/tcl/doc/tclUsenix90.ps and ftp://www.tcl.tk/pub/tcl/doc/tkUsenix91.ps Larry also testifies on how he learned what he knows about Tcl (see [L7 ]) and then what he did to build on that (see [L8 ])
• Bob Techentin insightfully critiques existing and prospective Tk GUI builders (see [L9 ]) and inspires several other mature engineers to a vigorous discussion of IDE's roles, CASE, alternative technologies to Tcl, ...
• Chris Brown asks an apt question about opaque types, which receives several distinct correct answers (see [L10 ])
• Tclpp is a "pure Tcl" object-oriented system reminiscent of C++ http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Network/2836/tclpp.html
• Duncan Barclay draws attention to Tuan Doan's .dxf converter from 1993 (see [L11 ])
• Kumar Srinivas reveals that isql-tcl 4.0 (that's an Informix interface) is imminent (see [L12 ])
• Joachim Faulhaber balances his karma with a methodical tutorial on construction of a new Tk widget (see [L13 ])
• Eric Boudaillier carefully explains a nice small instance of the use of "break" in an event binding (see [L14 ])