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Text File | 1995-03-24 | 12.6 KB | 287 lines

Tcl by John Ousterhout john.ousterhout@eng.sun.com @(#) README 1.10 95/03/24 09:38:11 1. Introduction --------------- This directory contains the sources and documentation for Tcl, an embeddable tool command language. The information here corresponds to release 7.4b3 (a beta release of Tcl 7.4). This release contains many bug fixes and a few new features; it should be backwards compatible with Tcl 7.3 except for one change related to Tcl_AppInit (see below for details). 2. Documentation ---------------- The best way to get started is to read "the Tcl book": Title: Tcl and the Tk Toolkit Author: John K. Ousterhout Publisher: Addison-Wesley ISBN: 0-201-63337-X The "doc" subdirectory in this release contains a complete set of reference manual entries for Tcl. Files with extension ".1" are for programs (for example, tclsh.1); files with extension ".3" are for C library procedures; and files with extension ".n" describe Tcl commands. The file "doc/Tcl.n" gives a quick summary of the Tcl language syntax. To print any of the man pages, cd to the "doc" directory and invoke your favorite variant of troff using the normal -man macros, for example ditroff -man Tcl.n to print Tcl.n. If Tcl has been installed correctly and your "man" program supports it, you should be able to access the Tcl manual entries using the normal "man" mechanisms, such as man Tcl 3. Compiling and installing Tcl ------------------------------- This release should compile and run either "out of the box" or with trivial changes on any UNIX-like system that approximates POSIX, BSD, or System V. I know that it runs on workstations from Sun, H-P, and DEC. To compile Tcl, do the following: (a) Check for patches. Look in the FTP directory from which you retrieved the base distribution and see if there are files with names like tcl7.4p1.patch, tcl7.4p2patch, etc. These files may also have .Z extensions to indicate compression. If you find any patch files, apply them to the source directory in order from "p1" up. To apply an uncompressed patch file such as tcl7.4p1.patch, invoke a shell command like the following from the directory containing this file: patch -p < tcl7.4p1.patch If the patch file is compressed, invoke a command like the following: zcat tcl7.4p2.patch.Z | patch -p (b) Type "./configure" in this directory. This runs a configuration script created by GNU autoconf, which configures Tcl for your system and creates a Makefile. The configure script allows you to customize the Tcl configuration for your site; for details on how you can do this, check out the autoconf documenation (not included here). (c) Type "make". This will create a library archive called "libtcl.a" and an interpreter application called "tclsh" that allows you to type Tcl commands interactively or execute script files. (d) If the make fails then you'll have to personalize the Makefile for your site or possibly modify the distribution in other ways. First check the file "porting.notes" to see if there are hints for compiling on your system. If you need to modify Makefile, there are comments at the beginning of it that describe the things you might want to change and how to change them. (e) Type "make install" to install Tcl binaries and script files in standard places. You'll need write permission on /usr/local to do this. See the Makefile for details on where things get installed. (f) At this point you can play with Tcl by invoking the "tclsh" program and typing Tcl commands. However, if you haven't installed Tcl then you'll first need to set your TCL_LIBRARY variable to hold the full path name of the "library" subdirectory. If you have trouble compiling Tcl, I'd suggest looking at the file "porting.notes". It contains information that people have sent me about changes they had to make to compile Tcl in various environments. I make no guarantees that this information is accurate, complete, or up-to-date, but you may find it useful. If you get Tcl running on a new configuration, I'd be happy to receive new information to add to "porting.notes". I'm also interested in hearing how to change the configuration setup so that Tcl compiles on additional platforms "out of the box". 4. Test suite ------------- There is a relatively complete test suite for all of the Tcl core in the subdirectory "tests". To use it just type "make test" in this directory. You should then see a printout of the test files processed. If any errors occur, you'll see a much more substantial printout for each error. See the README file in the "tests" directory for more information on the test suite. The Tcl test suite is very sensitive to proper implementation of ANSI C library procedures such as sprintf and sscanf. If the test suite generates errors, most likely they are due to non-conformance of your system's ANSI C library; such problems are unlikely to affect any real applications so it's probably safe to ignore them. 5. Additional release information --------------------------------- We're in the process of setting up a collection of Web pages for Tcl and Tk. It should become available sometime early in January 1994. Initially the Web information will be available under the URL http://playground.sun.com/~ouster but eventually it will move to one of the following URLs: http://www.smli.com/tcl http://www.smli.com/research/tcl http://www.smli.com/research/~ouster The Web pages will include release updates, reports on bug fixes and porting issues, and other useful information. Check them out! 6. Summary of changes in recent releases ---------------------------------------- This is the third beta release of Tcl 7.4. Tcl7.4b3 contains a few bug fixes, plus two new features: 1. Tcl_CreateCommand returns a token that can be used to find the command later with Tcl_GetCommandName, even if it changes names later. This makes it easier for objects to handle command renames. 2. The parsing code for expressions has been changed to treat numbers like "089" as syntax errors instead of floating-point numbers. The Tcl 7.4b2 release contains only a few bug fixes and no new features. Tcl 7.4 is a minor release. There are many bug fixes (most of them minor), but only a few new features and just one potential incompatibility. For complete information on what has changed, see the file "changes". The one incompatible change is that Tcl no longer provides a "main" procedure by default. What used to be "main" is now called "Tcl_Main", and each application needs to provide a "main" that calls "Tcl_Main". Typically this is done in the tclAppInit.c file; see the tclAppInit.c file in the distribution for an example. Here is a summary of the new features in Tcl 7.4: 1. Added new "subst" command for making $ and [] substitutions on an strings. 2. The "array" command has several new features: - "get" and "set" commands for conversion between arrays and strings. - "exists" command for checking for array element existence. - "names" and "size" commands now treat a non-existent array the same as an empty one. - "names" takes an optional pattern argument. 3. "lindex", "linsert", "lrange", and "lreplace" all accept "end" as an index. 4. Expressions support unary "+". 5. The "string" command has new "wordstart" and "wordend" options. 6. Tcl now exports the procedures Tcl_RegExpCompile, Tcl_RegExpExec, and Tcl_RegExpRange for C-level access to pattern matching. 7. When an error occurs while creating a pipeline with "open", it is returned immediately as the result of the "open" rather than being delayed until the "close" command. 8. "regsub" now returns a count of the number of matches and replacements, rather than 0/1. 9. Added mechanism for tracking renames of commands. See the new procedure Tcl_GetCommandName. 7. Tcl newsgroup ----------------- There is a network news group "comp.lang.tcl" intended for the exchange of information about Tcl, Tk, and related applications. Feel free to use the newsgroup both for general information questions and for bug reports. I read the newsgroup and will attempt to fix bugs and problems reported to it. 8. Tcl contributed archive -------------------------- Many people have created exciting packages and applications based on Tcl and made them freely available to the Tcl community. An archive of these contributions is kept on the machine ftp.aud.alcatel.com. You can access the archive using anonymous FTP; the Tcl contributed archive is in the directory "/tcl". The archive also contains several FAQ ("frequently asked questions") documents that provide solutions to problems commonly encountered by TCL newcomers. 9. Support and bug fixes ------------------------ We're very interested in receiving bug reports and suggestions for improvements. I suggest sending this information to the comp.lang.tcl newsgroup rather than to me. We'll see anything on comp.lang.tcl, and in addition someone else who reads comp.lang.tcl may be able to offer a solution. Bugs usually get fixed in 1-3 weeks, but enhancements may take a while and may not happen at all unless there is widespread support for them (I'm trying to slow the rate at which Tcl turns into a kitchen sink). It's almost impossible to make incompatible changes to Tcl at this point. When reporting bugs, please provide a short tclsh script that we can use to reproduce the bug. Make sure that the script runs with a bare-bones tclsh and doesn't depend on any extensions or other programs, particularly those that exist only at your site. Also, please include three additional pieces of information with the script: (a) how do we use the script to make the problem happen (e.g. what things do we click on, in what order)? (b) what happens when you do these things (presumably this is undesirable)? (c) what did you expect to happen instead? The Tcl community is too large for us to provide much individual support for users. If you need help I suggest that you post questions to comp.lang.tcl. We read the newsgroup and will attempt to answer esoteric questions for which no-one else is likely to know the answer. In addition, Tcl support and training are available commercially from NeoSoft ("info@neosoft.com") and from Computerized Processes Unlimited ("gwl@cpu.com"). 9. Tcl release organization --------------------------- Each Tcl release is identified by two numbers separated by a dot, e.g. 6.7 or 7.0. If a new release contains changes that are likely to break existing C code or Tcl scripts then the major release number increments and the minor number resets to zero: 6.0, 7.0, etc. If a new release contains only bug fixes and compatible changes, then the minor number increments without changing the major number, e.g. 7.1, 7.2, etc. If you have C code or Tcl scripts that work with release X.Y, then they should also work with any release X.Z as long as Z > Y. Beta releases have an additional suffix of the form bx. For example, Tcl 7.0b1 is the first beta release of Tcl version 7.0, Tcl 7.0b2 is the second beta release, and so on. A beta release is an initial version of a new release, used to fix bugs and bad features before declaring the release stable. Each new release will be preceded by one or more beta releases. We hope that lots of people will try out the beta releases and report problems back to me. We'll make new beta releases to fix the problems, until eventually there is a beta release that appears to be stable. Once this occurs we'll remove the beta suffix so that the last beta release becomes the official release. If a new release contains incompatibilities (e.g. 7.0) then we can't promise to maintain compatibility among its beta releases. For example, release 7.0b2 may not be backward compatible with 7.0b1. we'll try to minimize incompatibilities between beta releases, but if a major problem turns up then we'll fix it even if it introduces an incompatibility. Once the official release is made then there won't be any more incompatibilities until the next release with a new major version number. 10. Compiling on non-UNIX systems -------------------------------- The Tcl features that depend on system calls peculiar to UNIX (stat, fork, exec, times, etc.) are now separate from the main body of Tcl, which only requires a few generic library procedures such as malloc and strcpy. Thus it should be relatively easy to compile Tcl for non-UNIX machines such as MACs and DOS PC's, although a number of UNIX-specific commands will be absent (e.g. exec, time, and glob). See the comments at the top of Makefile for information on how to compile without the UNIX features.