Purpose: to describe the Extended Tcl extension's capabilities.
IMPORTANT: the TclX home page supplied below is out-of-date, in several regards. Most crucially, conventional access to the NeoSoft archive is broken, and it's apparently necessary to go here [L1 ] for downloads. Mirrors exist at several places, including Red Hat [L2 ], SourceForge [L3 ] (or is this supposed to be the real home?), Slackware, Marty Backe's pages [L4 ], Andreas Kupries' personal snapshot repository [L5 ], ... Morever, ActiveTcl includes TclX.
TclX [L6 ] is an essential package of extensions for Tcl/Tk. This package creates interpreters known as tcl and wishx. It adds advanced code loading facility, new programming constructs, debugging and profiling facilities, unix access commands, file I/O facilities including awk-like scanning for strings, extended list and a new key list capability, extended character and string manipulation commands, and time and date manipulation commands.
Extended Tcl is oriented towards system programming tasks and large application development. It provides a variety of additional interfaces to the underlying operating system, as well as many new programming constructs, text manipulation tools, and debugging capabilities.
Over the years, a variety of features originally appeared in TclX, and then, as the ideas were proven, migrated to the Tcl core. These features include Tcl's I/O system, its associative arrays, Internet networking interfaces, upvar, memory debugging... even incr.
TclX includes documentation on debugging memory problems [L7 ], on how to use its keyed list data type [L8 ], manipulating binary structures via handles [L9 ], a guide to writing Tcl commands in C [L10 ], and a reference manual for the new TclX commands themselves [L11 ].
On SourceForge it can be found at http://sourceforge.net/projects/tclx
In the past, there was also a TkX component. This part is being removed, as is the code for creating stand-alone interpreters tcl and wishx.
(Give an alternate description of TclX as Tcl augmented with POSIX stuff, such as fork, plus other conveniences common among Unixoids, including keyed lists, profiling, ...)
Extended Tcl has:
The following variables are set and/or used by the Tcl shell.
argv0
Contains the name of the Tcl program specified on the com-
mand line or the name that the Tcl shell was invoked under
if no program was specified. argc Contains a count of the
number of argv arguments (0 if none). argv A list contain-
ing the arguments passed in from the command line, excluding
arguments used by the Tcl shell. The first element is the
first passed argument, not the program name.
tcl_interactive
Set to 1 if Tcl shell is invoked interactively, or 0 if the
Tcl shell is directly executing a script. Normally checked
by scripts so that they can function as a standalone appli-
cation if specified on the command line, but merely load in
and not execute if loaded during an interactive invocation
of Tcl.
auto_path
Path to search to locate Tcl autoload libraries. Used by
the both the Tcl and TclX library autoloading facility.
tclx_library
Path to the TclX runtime library. If your running the TclX
shell or an application based on it (like wishx). The TclX
initialization file normally adds this to the auto_path.
tkx_library
Path to the TkX runtime library. This is set only if your
application has called Tkx_Init. The TkX initialization
file normally adds this to the auto_path.
tcl_prompt1
Contains code to run to output the prompt used when interac-
tively prompting for commands.
tcl_prompt2
Contains code to run to output the prompt used when interac-
tively prompting for continuation of an incomplete command.
TCLXENV
Array that contains information used internally by various
Tcl procedures that are part of the TclX shell.
Karl Lehenbauer first wrote TclX, and he and Mark Diekhans maintained it for a long time.