Don PorterDon PorterDonal K. Fellows$Revision: 1.7 $

This TIP proposes removal of the -e: command line option to tclsh and wish that was Accepted as part of .

was Accepted today. However, there were a few NO votes objecting to the new -e: form of the -encoding command line option for specifying the encoding of a startup script to tclsh and wish. Those voting NO only objected to that part of while supporting the rest as a solid proposal that will improve Tcl. Among those voting YES, no one explicitly embraced the -e: command line option as something they required. Some voting YES opined that the -e: option was a wart that could be fixed later. Based on those comments, would have been better had the -e: form of the command line option not been part of the proposal. This TIP proposes nothing more than removing Acceptance of the -e: form of the -encoding command line option. Without the controversial -e: proposal, I believe would have had unanimous approval.

The use of -e: as a command line option to tclsh or wish suffers when compared with the perl program. The perl -e option for evaluation of a Perl script provided on the command line is very well known, and it's a mistake to add something to tclsh that looks similar, but is in fact very different. proposed both -encoding and the -e: form. There's really no need to add multiple ways to do the same thing. The Rationale in for the -e: form is solely to support the 32-character limit in some Unices for their #! lines. However, the -e: form does not really solve that problem. For example: ICMhL3Vzci9sb2NhbC9iaW4vdGNsc2g4LjUgLWU6aXNvODg1OS0xNSA=IDEyMzQ1Njc4OTAxMjM0NTY3ODkwMTIzNDU2Nzg5MDEy Here we see that we still run afoul of the 32-character limit when tclsh is installed in the default location. Even longer encoding names exist which magnify the problem, and altering the installation location will not necessarily help: ICMhL3Vzci9iaW4vdGNsc2g4LjUgLWU6aXNvODg1OS0xNSA=IDEyMzQ1Njc4OTAxMjM0NTY3ODkwMTIzNDU2Nzg5MDEy (This is actually an insidious failure mode in that it leads to the script being sourced with a valid but incorrect encoding.) Conversely, we already have an effective general workaround for the 32-character limit problem: ICMhL2Jpbi9zaA==ICMgXA==IGV4ZWMgdGNsc2ggLWVuY29kaW5nIGlzbzg4NTktMTUgIiQwIiAkezErIiRAIn0= So, -e: doesn't solve a problem we don't really have, and it's controverisal. We should remove it.

Remove (Acceptance of) the -e: set of command line options to the programs tclsh and wish.

Since no version of Tcl or Tk has been released supporting the -e: command line option, there are no compatibility issues to resolve.

This document is placed in the public domain.