Tcl
by John Ousterhout
University of California at Berkeley
ouster@cs.berkeley.edu
1. Introduction
---------------
This directory contains the sources and documentation for Tcl, an
embeddable tool command language. The information here corresponds
to release 6.7.
For an introduction to the facilities provided by Tcl, your best bet
is to retrieve the partial draft of the Tcl/Tk book, which is available
for FTP from the standard Tcl/Tk release directories. Another possibility
is to see the paper ``Tcl: An Embeddable Command Language'', in the
Proceedings of the 1990 Winter USENIX Conference. A copy of that paper
is also available in Postscript form in the distribution directory.
However, the paper corresponds to a much earlier version of Tcl
(approximately version 3.0), so some details of the paper may not be
correct anymore and there are many new features not described in the
paper.
2. What's New Or Different In This Release
------------------------------------------
Tcl 6.7 contains just a few changes to fix a few minor configuration
and installation problems with Tcl 6.6. The 6.6 release also contains
only minor changes and should not break any existing Tcl scripts or C
programs. Refer to the "changes" file for complete details on all the
changes. Below is a list of the most significant changes in the 6.6
release:
(a) Added "elseif" support to the "if" command.
(b) Changed "puts" and "read" to support initial "-nonewline" switch
instead of additional "nonewline" argument. The old form is still
accepted but it's obsolete and shouldn't be used any more. Puts
now allows the file argument to be omitted, in which case it
defaults to stdout.
(c) Fixed several bugs in 6.5 related to detecting the ends of long
commands.
(d) Improved the Makefile (eliminated -f switch to cp, improved
installation, etc.)
Here are a few of the most important changes that appeared in the earlier
6.5 release. As with 6.6 and 6.7, the 6.5 release should not break any
existing Tcl scripts or C programs.
(a) The "unknown" procedure has been improved in several ways:
- It now allows nested auto-loads, so that the auto-load of one file
can trigger additional auto-loads, as long as there are no cycles.
- It now emulates csh's "!!", "!<num>", and "^<old>^<new>" history
substitutions.
- Auto_reset now deletes all auto-loaded procedures so that they'll
be reloaded from disk the next time they're invoked. This makes
script debugging easier.
(b) The installation setup has been modified (improved?) in several ways:
- The Makefile checks to be sure that config has been run and won't
compile the program if it hasn't.
- The TCL_LIBRARY environment variable can be used to override the
compiled-in location of the library directory.
- The "config" script is now cleverer about figuring out which switches
to pass to nm.
- Manual entries have been renamed to use ".3" and ".n" extensions.
- The Makefile includes a "make install" target.
- Introductory documents are no longer part of the release; they have
to be retrieved separately.
(c) There's a new command, "info complete", plus a C procedure
Tcl_CommandComplete, which provide some help in parsing Tcl commands.
3. Documentation
----------------
The "doc" subdirectory contains a complete set of manual entries for
Tcl. Files with extension ".3" are for C library procedures provided
by Tcl; files with extension ".n" describe the core Tcl commands. The
file "doc/Tcl.n" gives an overall description of the Tcl language and
describes the core Tcl commands (most of this material is now available
in a more palatable form in the book draft). 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 <file>
where <file> is the name of the man page you'd like to print.
4. Machines supported
---------------------
If you follow the directions below, this release should compile
and run on the following configurations either "out of the box"
or with only trivial changes:
- Sun-3's, Sun-4's, SPARCstation-1's and SPARCstation-2's running
many variants of SunOS, such as 4.1.
- DECstation-3100's and DECstation-5000's running many versions of
Ultrix, such as 2.0 and 4.2.
- DEC VAXes running many versions of Ultrix or BSD UNIX.
- Intel 386 based systems running SCO Unix 3.2v2.
- Intel 386 based systems running SCO Xenix 2.3.3.
- Intel 386 based systems running Bell-Tech (now Intel) Unix 3.2.0.
- Silicon Graphics systems running IRIX 4.0.
- Various H-P machines running versions of HP-UX such as 7.05
- Sequent Symmetry running versions of Dynix/ptx such as v1.2.4
- AT&T 368 machines running SVR4 2.0.1
If you find problems running Tcl on any of the above configurations,
please let me know. Also, if you are able to compile Tcl and run the
test suite successfully on configurations not listed above, please
let me know and tell me what changes, if any, you needed to make to
do it. I'd like to keep the above list up-to-date and continue to
improve the portability of Tcl.
Tcl can be used on many other configurations with only a few
modifications. The file "porting.notes" contains information sent to
me about what it took to get Tcl to run on various other configurations.
I make no guarantees that this information is accurate or complete, 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".
5. Compiling Tcl
----------------
To compile Tcl on any of the configurations listed above, or systems
similar to them, do the following:
(a) If your system isn't one of the ones listed above, look in the
file "porting.notes" to see if your system is listed there. This
file contains additional notes on getting Tcl to run on various
other systems.
(b) Edit the "set" commands at the beginning of the file "config"
if necessary to correspond to your system configuration (they
should already be right for most versions of Unix).
(c) Configure the Makefile in this directory according to the
instructions at the beginning of the file. In particular, if
you're not going to install the library in the suggested place
(/usr/local/lib/tcl) you need to reset the TCL_LIBRARY variable.
You may also want to change CC, CFLAGS, etc.
(d) Type "./config" to invoke Tcl's auto-configuration script. This
script pokes around in your system to see if certain almost-standard
things are missing (header files, library procedures, etc.); if
your system doesn't seem to have them, it configures Tcl to use
its own copies of these things instead (Tcl's copies are kept in
the "compat" subdirectory). Config prints out messages for all
the substitutions it made. You can ignore any of the messages
unless they say "ERROR!!", in which case something is fundamentally
wrong and the script couldn't handle your system configuration.
If Tcl isn't able to configure itself to compile on your machine,
then I suggest the following approach:
- Start again with a fresh copy of the distribution.
- Set the #defines that appear at the very front of
tclUnix.h (before the first #include) to correspond
to your system.
- Create a file "configured" in this directory, so that the
Makefile won't generate errors.
- If things don't compile or don't link, then you may need
to copy some of the .c or .h files from the "compat"
directory into the main Tcl directory to compensate for
files missing from your system. Modify the COMPAT_OBJS
definition in Makefile to include a .o name for each of
the .c files that you copied up from the compat directory.
(e) Type "make" to compile the library. This will create the Tcl
library in "libtcl.a". The Makefile should work without any
modifications but you may wish to personalize it, e.g. to
turn on compiler optimization.
(f) 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.
(g) Type "make tclTest", which will create a simple test program that
you can use to try out the Tcl facilities. TclTest is just a
main-program sandwich around the Tcl library. It reads standard
input until it reaches the end of a line where parentheses and
backslashes are balanced, then sends everything it's read to the
Tcl interpreter. When the Tcl interpreter returns, tclTest prints
the return value or error message. TclTest defines a few other
additional commands, most notably:
echo arg arg ...
The "echo" command prints its arguments on standard output,
separated by spaces.
6. 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. Tcl should pass the test suite cleanly on all of the
systems listed in Section 4. See the README file in the "tests"
directory for more information on the test suite.
7. 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
these machines, 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.
8. Special thanks
-----------------
Mark Diekhans and Karl Lehenbauer of Santa Cruz Operation deserve special
thanks for all their help during the development of Tcl 6.0. Many of the
new features in Tcl 6.0 were inspired by an enhanced version of Tcl 3.3
called Extended Tcl 4.0, which was created by Mark, Karl, and Peter
da Silva. Mark and Karl explained these features to me and provided
excellent (and challenging) feedback during the 6.0 development process.
They were also a great help in finding and fixing portability problems.
Without their ideas and assistance Tcl 6.0 would be much less powerful.
9. Support
----------
There is no official support organization for Tcl, and I can't promise
to provide much hand-holding to people learning Tcl. However, I'm very
interested in receiving bug reports and suggestions for improvements.
Bugs usually get fixed quickly (particularly if they are serious), but
enhancements may take a while and may not happen at all unless there
is widespread support for them.
10. 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
this 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.
These are the contents of the former NiCE NeXT User Group NeXTSTEP/OpenStep software archive, currently hosted by Netfuture.ch.