Release: 8.0.5,
Mar 9, 1999.
If you are using software that requires a particular
Tcl/Tk 8.0 release (e.g., 8.0.4 or 8.0p2) you can probably
do just fine with the 8.0.5 release.
If you need a particular release, please check out our
FTP site.
Related links:
When you download Tcl and Tk you get two programs, wish
and tclsh
, supporting script libraries, and on-line reference
documentation. These programs are general purpose platforms for writing
applications with Tcl. Wish
includes the graphical user
interface toolkit Tk. The packages are ready to use after installation.
Platforms Supported
Downloading Binary Releases for Windows and Macintosh
Downloading Source Releases for UNIX, Windows and Macintosh
What's New in Tcl 8.0
What's New in Tk 8.0
Incompatibilities
Patches
License Terms
Tcl 8.0 and Tk 8.0 run on most releases of the following operating systems:
Tcl requires the Win32s subsystem on Windows 3.1. If you keep your Tcl1680.DLL from the 8.0p2 distribution you may still be able to use 8.0.3 or later on Windows 3.1, but there is no guarantee that this will continue to work. One cannot even compile this DLL with the current Microsoft compilers.
wish
and tclsh
programs, and documentation.
If you're running on a platform other than the ones listed above, or if you want to make modifications to Tcl and Tk, you'll need to retrieve the source releases. The files listed below correspond to the latest stable release. For access to the very latest source, you can use our Net CVS Repository. The stable source releases are available separately for Tcl and Tk in several different forms:
You'll want both Tcl and Tk sources. Choose between compressed tar and gzipped tar format. The ZIP files listed under the Windows sources contain the same information, too.
These files are in binhex format, which is understood by Fetch, StuffIt, and many other Mac utilities. The unpacked file is a self-installing executable: double-click on it and it will create a folder containing sources files used to build Tcl and Tk.
tcl8.0.5.tar.gz
or
tcl8.0.5.tar.Z
.
The files are identical except for the technique used to compress
them (.gz
files are generally smaller than .Z
files, but gunzip is not bundled with all UNIX versions).
To unpack the distribution, invoke shell commands like the
following, depending on which version of the release you retrieved:
gunzip -c tcl8.0.5.tar.gz | tar xf - zcat tcl8.0.5.tar.Z | tar xf - unzip tcl805.zip
Each of these commands will create a directory named tcl8.0.5
,
which includes the sources for all platforms, documentation, and the
script library for Tcl 8.0.5.
To compile and install the distribution,
follow the instructions in the README
file in the distribution
directory. Be sure to compile Tcl before Tk, since Tk depends on information
in Tcl.
Tcl and Tk should compile with little or no effort on any platform that runs a UNIX-like operating system and the X Window System. This includes workstations from Sun, HP, IBM, SGI, and DEC, PCs running a number of Unix operating systems such as Solaris, Linux, SCO UNIX, and FreeBSD, plus many other platforms such as Cray and NEC supercomputers. These releases should also compile with little or no effort on Windows and Macintosh platforms.
The most important changes in Tcl 8.0 are summarized below. See
the README
and changes
files in the distribution
for more complete information on what has changed, including both feature
changes and bug fixes.
Tcl_Obj
structures ("objects")
that can hold both a string value and an internal form such as a binary
integer or compiled bytecodes. The new objects make it possible to
store information in efficient internal forms and avoid the constant
translations to and from strings that occurred with the old interpreter.
We have not yet converted all of Tcl to take full advantage of the
compiler and objects and have not converted any of Tk yet, but even
so you should see speedups of 2-3x on many programs and you may see
speedups as much as 10-20x in some cases (such as code that manipulates
long lists). Future releases should achieve even greater speedups.
The compiler introduces only a few minor changes at the level of Tcl
scripts, but it introduces many new C APIs for managing objects. See,
for example, the manual entries doc/*Obj*.3
.
namespace
and
variable
commands. There are many new C APIs associated
with namespaces, but they will not be exported until Tcl 8.1.
binary
command for
inserting and extracting data to/from binary strings. Many commands,
such as puts
, gets
, and read
, now
operate correctly on binary data. There is a new variable
tcl_platform(byteOrder)
to identify the native byte order
for the current host.
expr
command
now contains a random number generator, which can be accessed via the
rand()
and srand()
math functions.
registry
command is available under Windows to access the registry. It is
available as a package named registry
.
interp
hide
, interp expose
, interp invokehidden
,
and interp hidden
and the C APIs Tcl_HideCommand
and Tcl_ExposeCommand
. There is now support for safe
packages and extension loading, including new library procedures such as
safe::interpCreate
(see the manual entry safe.n for
details).
http.n
for details.
file attributes
for getting and
setting things like permissions and owner. There is also a new command
file nativename
for getting back the platform-specific name
for a particular file.
fcopy
command to copy data between
channels either in foreground or in the background using file events.
This replaces and improves upon the not-so-secret unsupported old
command unsupported0
.
library.n
for details.
Tcl_Finalize
(for cleaning up
before unloading the Tcl DLL) and Tcl_Ungets
for pushing
bytes back into a channel's input buffer.
fconfigure -mode
option. The Windows driver does not yet support event-driven I/O on
serial devices.
lsort
command has new options -dictionary
and -index
. The -index
option allows for
very rapid sorting based on an element of a list.
The most important changes in Tk 8.0 are summarized below. See the
README
and changes
files in the distribution
for more complete information on what has changed, including both feature
changes and bug fixes.
-menu
option for a toplevel
is used to specify the name of the menubar; the menu will be displayed
outside the toplevel using different mechanisms on each platform
(e.g. on the Macintosh the menu will appear at the top of the screen).
See the menu demos in the widget demo for examples. The old style of
menus still works, but does not provide native look and feel. Menus
have several new features:
-columnbreak
and -hidemargin
options
make it possible to create multi-column menus.
<<MenuSelect>>
whenever the current item changes. Applications can use this to
generate help messages.
-direction
option for menubuttons, which
controls where the menu pops up relative to the button.
{Times 12 Bold}
can also be used. See the manual entry
font.n
for details.
font
for creating named fonts
and querying various information about fonts. If a named font is
changed, any widget using that font updates itself to reflect the
change.
MeasureChar.3
, TextLayout.3
,
and FontId.3
.
Tk_GetFontStruct
, Tk_NameOfFontStruct
,
and Tk_FreeFontStruct
have been replaced with more portable
procedures Tk_GetFont
, Tk_NameOfFont
, and
Tk_FreeFont
.
-container
option
on frame widgets and the -use
option for toplevel widgets
or on the command line for wish
. Embedding should be fully
functional under Unix, but the implementation is incomplete on the
Macintosh and PC.
images
library
subdirectory. Use and enjoy!
safe::loadTk
.
-default
option for drawing default
rings in a platform-specific manner.
gray75
bitmap, and the
gray25
bitmap is now really 25% on (due to an ancient
mistake, it had been only 12% on). The Macintosh now supports native
bitmaps, including new builtin bitmaps stop
,
caution
, and note
, plus the ability to use
bitmaps in the application's resource fork.
destroy
command now ignores windows that don't exist instead
of generating an error.
As suggested by the change in major release number, these releases introduce some incompatibilities that affect scripts written for previous releases. The main source of incompatibilities is the new Tcl compiler. There were several places where the old Tcl semantics introduced complexity or inefficiency into the compiler, so we decided to try a few small changes to the semantics of the language to eliminate the problems. The changes all involve obscure cases that we hope won't affect many people. The incompatibility issues raised by the compiler are described in detail in a separate document.
There are also a few other minor incompatibilities in Tcl 8.0 and Tk 8.0:
::
anymore: this sequence is now used as a namespace separator.
clock
command
to handle year 2000 issues better (years 00-38 are treated as
2000-2038 instead of 1900-1938).
tcl_precision
is now shared between interpreters
and defaults to 12 digits instead of 6; safe interpreters cannot
modify tcl_precision
. The new object system in Tcl 8.0 causes
floating-to-string conversions (and the associated rounding) to
occur much less often than in Tcl 7.6, which can sometimes cause
behavioral changes.
cp
, mkdir
,
mv
, rm
, and rmdir
are no longer
supported; all of these features are now available on all platforms
via the file
command.
Tcl_CreateModalTimeout
and
Tcl_DeleteModalTimeout
have been removed.
Tcl_CreateFileHandler
and
Tcl_DeleteFileHandler
now take Unix fd's and are only
supported on the Unix platform.
Tcl_GetChannelFile
has been replaced with
Tcl_GetChannelHandle
. Tcl_MakeFileChannel
now
takes a platform-specific file handle.
Times 12
now interpret the
size as points, whereas it used to be pixels (this was actually a bug,
since the behavior was documented as points). To get pixels now, use a
negative size such as Times -12
.
-transient
option for menus is no longer
supported. You can achieve the same effect with the -type
field.
coords
command, polygons now return only
the points that were explicitly specified when the polygon was created
(they used to return an extra point if the polygon wasn't originally
closed). Internally, polygons are still closed automatically for
purposes of display and hit detection; the extra point just isn't
returned by the coords
command.
Tk_GetFontStruct
,
Tk_NameOfFontStruct
, and Tk_FreeFontStruct
are
no longer available. Use Tk_GetFont
,
Tk_NameOfFont
, and Tk_FreeFont
instead.
Patches are available to correct several problems discovered in the original releases of Tcl 8.0 and Tk 8.0. As additional bugs are found, more patches will be released. At present, the following patches are available for Tcl 8.0 and Tk 8.0:
If you are downloading a release for the first time, be sure to get the
highest patch level that is available. If you currently have an older
patch level of Tcl 8.0 and Tk 8.0 installed, you may wish to upgrade
to the most recent patch release. Patch releases should not introduce
any compatibility problems, so it should always be safe to upgrade.