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Since Tcl has been around for twenty years now, there is a fair amount of outdated information on the web regarding Tcl's features, performance and capabilities that doesn't apply at all to modern Tcl versions.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):

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

Comments:

  1. Dossy Shiobara wrote (at Thu, 03 Jan 2008, 04:08):

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.

  1. Michael A. Cleverly wrote (at Thu, 03 Jan 2008, 08:48):

Doh! Talk about glaring oversight--I meant to include it on the list... (*blush*).

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