Tcl 8.5
After more than four years in the making, Tcl 8.5 was released a few days before Christmas. And wow, what a treat it is!
This release is, in my opinion, the best ever.
I first became acquainted with Tcl 10-years ago via Philip Greenspun's original Database Backed Websites book. At the time AOLserver 2.x was closed source but available at no cost. I never had much hands on experience with the Tcl 7.6, 8.0, 8.1 and 8.2 releases; I made the jump straight to Tcl 8.3 (IIRC) once America Online open sourced the code base for AOLserver 3.x.
Since Tcl has been around for twenty years now, there is a fair amount of outdated information on the web regarding Tcl's features, performance and capabilities that doesn't apply at all to modern Tcl versions.
There are a number of features that excite me in this release. I intend to blog a bit about each of the following (I'll update this post with links to subsequent posts as they get written):
- Extending expr with custom math functions
- Arbitrary preceision integers
- The new in & ni operators
- namespace ensembles
- Dictionaries
- Custom channel drivers
- (Safe) interpreter resource limits
- Anonymous lambda procedures & apply
Stay tuned.
Addendum: Dossy points out that I overlooked the biggest news: the {*} expand operator, which means an expansion from the 11-rule endekalogue to a 12-rule dodekalogue. (Tcl 8.5, now with 9% more syntax!)
—Michael A. Cleverly
Wednesday, January 02, 2008 at 22:50
Very nice short summary of the significant changes in Tcl 8.5, but I think you left one out:
{*}: http://wiki.tcl.tk/17158
Tcl finally gets a splat implementation.
Thu, 03 Jan 2008, 04:08