Purpose: Place to provide reasons for using [Jacl] and [Swank]
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[BAJ] started this 27 May 2004 and hopes to periodically add new items to the list (others please join in as well).  The  items (at least as added by [BAJ]) are in no particular order of importance.

   * While the [tcllib] has added many useful features to Tcl, it has the following restriction "the module must be Tcl only: no C extensions. This minimizes the barrier to use -- not everybody has the means or desire to compile extensions.".  This restriction, while very appropriate, provides a significant limitation to the types of features added.  As Jacl/Swank extensions can be done as cross-platform Java bytecode files this restriction isn't necessary.


   * Get access to features of the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) without writing a single line of Java code.  In this example we create an object which is an instance of the GregorianCalendar class [http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/api/java/util/GregorianCalendar.html].  The java::new command creates the new object and returns a handle to the object.  The handle can be used to invoke methods of the class:

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        > set cal [java::new java.util.GregorianCalendar]
        java0x2
        > $cal isLeapYear 1999
        0
        > $cal isLeapYear 2004
        1
        $cal get [java::field java.util.GregorianCalendar DAY_OF_WEEK]
        5
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