by [Cameron Laird] - 'DejaNews:'' [http://www.dejanews.com/getdoc.xp?AN=397859398]

''There are plans for 8.0.4.''

   * The public visibility of Tcl continues to rise. John Ousterhout will deliver the Keynote Address at next year's Usenix Annual Technical Conference http://www.usenix.org/events/usenix99/ while Mark Hall's editorial in the November 1998 issue of *Performance Computing* mentions Scriptics as an example of the growing legitimacy of open-source software http://www.performance-computing.com/opinions/throttle/9811.shtml [administrative note: this is a big deal, because Hall is known for his rapport with Serious Organizations that spend lots of money] and Nicholas Petreley salutes scripting in *InfoWorld* http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/displayNew.pl?/petrel/980928np.htm Consortium Director Peter Salus is speaking at DECUS '98/LA this week http://ww2.decus.org/la98/default.stm
   * Good leadership balances knowledge and practice: Larry Virden explains that Scriptics is only a part of the Tcl world (see [http://www.dejanews.com/getdoc.xp?AN=397202350]) and actively expands the boundaries of that world with the launch of his Tcl projects page (see [http://www.dejanews.com/getdoc.xp?AN=396694586])
   * Alexandre Ferrieux encourages fileevent programming, even under Win* (see [http://www.dejanews.com/getdoc.xp?AN=395565360]) and summarizes in two lines the state-of-the-art in wedding ActiveX and Tcl (see [http://www.dejanews.com/getdoc.xp?AN=396351174])
   * Eric Boudaillier gave a nice minimal "click-draining" routine; Donal Fellows significantly refines it (see [http://www.dejanews.com/getdoc.xp?AN=395925478])
   * To my surprise, Paul Duffin's deeply substantive suggestion on a way to simplify management of extensions inspired no follow-ups (see [http://www.dejanews.com/getdoc.xp?AN=394876729])
   * George Howlett, Don Libes, Donal Fellows, Tom Poindexter, and Jeffrey Hobbs give the very practical education to prospective extension-writers of relating their own experiences "poking in the internals" (see [http://www.dejanews.com/getdoc.xp?AN=396025993])
   * "Free for the downloading" data management which works: Linux, Sybase, and Tom Poindexter's SybTcl (see [http://www.dejanews.com/getdoc.xp?AN=396916625])
   * Despite the widespread use of the Plugin (see [http://www.dejanews.com/getdoc.xp?AN=391861579]) it was at risk for a kind of abandonment. Laurent Demailly saves it from that fate (see [http://www.dejanews.com/getdoc.xp?AN=396250223])
   * Many people this week had trouble finding Don Libes' explanation of how to send control characters with Expect http://expect.nist.gov/FAQ.html#q40
   * "Visual C++ will be the referencing compiler for Tcl/Tk on Windows" (see [http://www.dejanews.com/getdoc.xp?AN=395523179])
   * Donal K. Fellows offers a pleasant little loadable (of course) extension which turns procedures into functions (see [http://www.dejanews.com/getdoc.xp?AN=395576275])
   * "ps_dump_frame takes a frame as argument and dumps all canvases and graphs under that frame into one postscript file," according to Leo Schubert (see [http://www.dejanews.com/getdoc.xp?AN=396374603])