Purpose: a discussion of some of the information you should be prepared to provide when asking someone for help and where you can go to ask for help. ---- Here are some of the places on the internet where questions relating to how one programs in Tcl, or makes use of Tcl, can be discussed. * news:comp.lang.tcl * http://www.tcl.tk/ forums * http://wiki.tcl.tk/ (this very Wiki) * [Ask, and it shall be given.] (a particularly handy Questions & Answers section of this Wiki) * [Tcl Chatroom] interactive discussion area ---- [LV]: * My first suggestion is to take several deep breaths, as it sounds like you are about to hypervenilate. * Be prepared to show what your current code looks like. * As specifically as possible, tell what it is that the shown code should do. If your code is very long, feel free to visit the wiki's [graffiti] or [new pages] page and start a new wiki page and just glue your code in there and then give a url. Or, if you have your own web page, just give a url to that. * tell what kind of computer and operating system you are using, along with what version of tcl/expect ... These steps will help you in that focusing on positive actions should slow down your heart rate and regulate your breathing... and for us it provides us a common background from which to try to help you. [Cameron]: On communicating code fragments and the limitations of this medium: the constraint is a good thing. Working to reduce your situation to a textual description augmented by at most a couple of lines of code is sure to benefit everyone concerned. LV: Good point - I really hammer my users on this point. Handing me a foreign piece of code thousands of lines and procs long is guaranteed to cause me to try to hand it back ... On the other hand, showing me a small piece of code - hopefully stand alone so that I can try it on my machine without having to load and build a thousand pieces - results in me being able to 'tinker'. DNew: Also, it can be helpful to describe the larger, over-all problem in addition to the Tcl question you have. You may be seeking help getting a sub-optimal solution working, or someone else may have already solved the larger problem for you. [[Months later, [CL] muses on the idea of construction of [minimal example]s.]] ---- A crucial topic dual to this page is, "[How to read answers posted on the comp.lang.tcl newsgroup]". ---- See also [The comp.lang.tcl newsgroup] and the [Tcl chatroom]. See also "How to Ask Questions the Smart Way" [http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html]. People in some circles talk about "Not fixing the wrong problem" [http://www.allmyfaqs.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Fix_the_wrong_problem]. ---- [LV] later muses that often he finds the person asking the question is ''too close to the trees to see the forest'' - that is to say, asks questions about the immediate error rather than stepping back and seeing if there are more fundamental misunderstandings or assumptions. CL replies, though, that it's hard to know how to operationalize that, in a content-free way. The naive can easily go too far in the other direction. On one hand, yes, people frequently come through asking extremely involved questions about the [Tcl/Tk Tclet Plugin], say, without understanding the most basic facts about the differences between server-side and client-side processing. On the other hand, we have folks who give us pages of details about version numbers, processor variant, script source, and so on, when all that's going on ("in their visible spectrum") is that they have "" where they want {}. All I know to do is condition people to expect to engage in civil, productive conversation.