Wiki summary - 22 september 2019

Summer and winter have just about ended and we are moving well into autumn and spring, depending on your hemisphere. Time for another summary in any case!

Oh, by the way: if you use the "More detail" option on the Wiki, you get to see a lot of detail indeed. Some older gems get polished a bit and do not show up in the ordinary Changes. It is well worth exploring as well.

Codes, comments and customs

fossil is one of those gems well-known in the Tcl world, but apparently not appreciated as much outside. How to chisel at chiselapp.com, however, tells you set up your projects with fossil and get all the benefits of this wonderful, surprisingly light-weight, version control system.

Documentation is always a bit of a problem, isn't it? For many programmers it is something that comes after you had all the fun coding your exciting ideas. Perhaps Ruff! can help, as with a just bit of discipline you can extract your comments directly from the source code and turn them into nice looking docs.

A minimal debugger can be written using Tcl's [uplevel] command and other features. It is minimal, of course, but explore other possibilities from this page.

We all want to write quality software, don't we? If you are a bit uncertain about how to achieve that, perhaps these Tips for writing quality software can inspire you.

You may have seen the name before, Nagelfar, and wondered what it was all about. Searching the Web brings up mythological concepts - or a heavy-metal band. What it does in the Tcl world, is something completely different: static analysis of your code!

Eye candy

Knots are besides mathematical objects with their own set of intellectual esthetics also very decorative, as demonstrated by this page: Solomon's Knot.

Menus to toplevel windows need not be limited to lists of "dull" choices, as this flexmenu package shows.

tkFPlot is a nice little tool to visualise mathematical functions. Now it comes with an interactive demo on the Wiki.

Hard labour

There was a discussion the other week on the comp.lang.tcl newsgroup about calculating the Distance from a Point to a Plane (3D) - and several people posted implementations on the Wiki.

The page on Numeric arrays in pure Tcl testifies of a longing for a facility to do "heavy" numerical calculations within Tcl programs. Has anyone ever counted the number of experiments? (Your Wiki chronicler is responsible for a non-negligeable fraction)

And - call me a nerd - why not? Solitons and the Korteweg-de Vries equation shows that classical physical-mathematical problems are well within reach of amateurs (in the widest sense of the word).