Version 0 of What other kinds of changes will a developer have to make when moving from Tcl 8.4 to 8.5?

Updated 2007-11-26 16:54:21 by LV

This topic came up on comp.lang.tcl, initially in this thread [L1 ].

Some of the responses posted include:

motion in the text widget may have problems.

  • Scripts that depend on details of font handling may have problems.
  • you're SOL if you're on Mac Classic. :-)
  • it's not a good idea to write scripts that depend on formats of particular error messages.
  • If you use only tcl.h, tk.h and the exported functions from the stubs table you're quite safe.
  • If you go from 8.4 to 8.5 it should be easy, simply recompile.
  • If you go from 8.x x <4 to 8.5 you may need to fix some CONST stuff that changed in 8.4. (see http://wiki.tcl.tk/3669 )
  • If you go from 7.x to 8.5 you can expect some more work.
  • If you use tclInt.h or other non public interfaces all bets are off..., try to recompile and see where the compiler bitches.
  • my very first test failed, trying xtem from http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/support/xtem_texmenu/xtem/?action=/te ...
I get (when pressing the exit button)

bad variable name "geom(.xtemqd)": upvar won't create a scalar variable that
looks like an array element
     while executing
"global [set var]"
     (procedure "writeVarList2File" line 5)
:
(followed by more text that I won't quote)
:
  • Reply was: This statement used to be "useless": it would have created a variable that is completely unreachable from Tcl code. It is now an error.
  • if you were using the dict as an extension in 8.4, you may want to

remove the package require dict since it is now built into 8.5.

  • also, there have been a number of significant upgrades for dicts in Tcl 8.5
  • integer operations no longer wrap around at 2^31.
  • tcl_precision changed - where previously numbers might have displayed as 3.3, under 8.5 they may show as 3.30000000000003 for example. I had to fix this by adding additional trace commands and shadow variables to reformat the numbers.
  • grid behavior changed when the widget is smaller than the container. Tcl 8.5 added the grid anchor command but the 8.5 default is nw while 8.4 behavior was center.
  • take a look at the entries in the "changes" files (included in the Tcl and Tk source code distributions) that are marked ** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY **.
Category Documentation