Version 16 of Highlights of Tcl 8.6

Updated 2012-12-19 19:26:57 by dgp

Using this page to "crowd-source" some text for http://www.tcl.tk/software/tcltk/8.6.html .

Object Oriented Programming

The commands of the TclOO package are now part of Tcl itself. This gives Tcl a built-in object system that is fully dynamic, class-based, and includes advanced features such as meta-classes, filters, and mixins.

New version 4 of the popular package Itcl (aka incr Tcl) is also included, granting support for some traditional OO Tcl programming out of the box as well.

Stackless Evaluation

Enhanced Exceptions

New commands try and throw and a wealth of new -errorcode values enable far more precise trapping and handling of exceptions with a familiar construct.

Batteries Included

Tcl delivers in the pkgs subdirectory a bundled collection of third-party packages built and installed along with Tcl.

Thread-enabled Operations

A thread-enabled default build, a bundled Thread package, and new command interp cancel make Tcl 8.6 ready for your multi-threaded programming tasks.

SQL Database Powered

The bundled Tcl DataBase Connectivity (tdbc) interface package makes it possible to write your SQL database-powered scripts decoupled from any particular database engine. The bundled sqlite3 and tdbc::sqlite3 packages supply a powerful and popular SQL database engine ready to use.

IPv6 Networking

The socket command now recognizes numeric IPv6 addresses as valid values for its $host argument where platform support exists.

Built-in Zlib Compression

New command zlib provides utilities to handle compression of data and streams.

List Processing

New commands lmap and dict map enable the elegant expression of transformations over Tcl containers.

Stacked Channels by Script

New commands chan push and chan pop expose the power of stacked channels without the need to write C code.

Other New Features