Purpose: develop a list of needs and wishes for someone developing stand alone or suites of applications. See also Extension Developer's Wishlist for Tcl and Application User's Wishlist for Tcl. Tk can also be covered here (we can spin it off to a new page if necessary).
What constitutes urgent or required? Good question. What is critical for one person might be fluff or nonsense to someone else. The best I can do is give this kind of guideline. I would personally consider a feature urgent and needed in Tcl if it required the core to be modified, or extensive new code to be developed (as opposed to a wrapping for an existing library), to support some feature that might be useful to more than one customer.
Tcl 9.0 Wishlist would, in my mind, be a subset of the total wishlist.
Urgent/required features missing in Tcl
- Support for OO development. Minimal OO requirements for Tcl is the start of some work on defining this.
- More basic functions that the Tcl programmer can invoke. What, specifically though, needs to be added?
- Native cross-platform support for drag and drop in Tk, including suitable default bindings for some widgets (text, entry widgets in particular), and library procedures where necessary to make it easy for other widgets to be made drag'n'drop aware.
Features that would be useful/helpful/cute but not necessary
- I would put bundling itcl or other extensions into this category myself. This is because an application developer can make use of technologies like Tclkit, Freewrap, the TclWrap, etc. to create a stand alone bundle of code. Having one or more existing extensions guaranteed to be present on the desktop if Tcl is there becomes, in my mind, a helpful, but not critical/necessary wish.
- MG July 10th 2005 - Not sure if this is the best/most current page for this, still, but.. I'd like to see a new value for the -compound option that many Tk widgets support, that works as the opposite of "none" - that is, if defined, the -text option is used instead of the -image/-bitmap options. For toolbars, particularly, it's nice to be able to easily switch between text/image/both, without having to $widget configure -image {} to get only the text to show. That is, IMHO, a real pain, as it means you have to keep track in a global array or somewhere else of which images are used by which widgets, so that when the user wants image/both again you can reconfigure it. Being able to just $widget config -compound [none/left/text] would be much easier, and would fit perfectly into the current workings of -compound, IMHO.
Joe's Current Wish List...
- A "file truncate" command. --> see ftruncate in TclX
NOTE: I meant a truncate command that is in the core, is fully cross platform, and operates on an open file_id (I have part of an implementation for Win32 done already).
- An "lsearch -nocase" option, for uniformity with string match.
- Bug fixes to make loading/unloading/reloading Tcl/Tk work properly.
- Blue Sky #1: all "known issues" fixed.
- Blue Sky #2: fully thread-safe/bulletproof Tk.
JJM
- a built in debugger ala perl that lets you single step and examine variables. TclPro, RamDebugger, idebug, etc. all fall short
AK: What is missing from TclPro to make it fall short in your eyes ?
PSW:
- It is not built in
- TclPro is impossible (at least very difficult) to build
- The newer version tcldev is not free
LV: active support
- BLTs bgexec. It makes control of both stdout and stderr of an exec'd program very easy. This feature is requested every once in a while in the newsgroup. US
Is it really bgexec that you want, or just easier control of stdout and stderr? bgexec has most of the limitations of Tcl's exec and it seems a shame to continue those if something new were being added.
Breadcrust's Wish List
- Fileevent errorreadable to allow the programs to take care of stderr instead of having to redirect it or using catch. (nice)
- Ability to read more hardware ports on all platforms (eg - Parallel, USB, IR). (required)
- Something like TclX's filelist built-in. (nice)
- Tk image rotate (required)
- Toplevel -title -geometry & -icon options (nice)
- wm iconbitmap -defualt on all platforms, not just windoze (nice)
- Command to change window icon to image stored in variable (nice)
- Statusbar & Iconbar/Toolbar widgets (nice)
- Linux kernal level Tcl execution (MISC plug-in driver) (nice)
LV a free tool that provides reports and possibly interactive access to variable and proc cross referencing, ala C's cscope program.
LES Much better looking Tk in Linux. At the very least, anti-aliasing for fonts.
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