Tcl/Tk 8.4a1 Release Announcement June 6, 2000 We are pleased to announce the 8.4a1 releases of the Tcl scripting language and the Tk toolkit. This is the first alpha release of Tcl/Tk 8.4. More details can be found below. We'd like to thank all those that submit bugs and patches as they are the primary source of information for us to identify problems in the core. This is an alpha release, which means that the release is likely to have bugs and is not yet feature-complete: we may add new features or change some of the existing features before the final 8.4 releases. Please let us know immediately about any problems you uncover with these releases. Where to get the new releases: ------------------------------ Tcl/Tk 8.4a1 are freely available in open source from the Tcl Developer Xchange web site at http://dev.scriptics.com/software/tcltk/8.4.html This web page also contains additional information about the releases, including new features and notes about installing and compiling the releases. For additional information: --------------------------- Please visit the Tcl Developer Xchange web site: http://dev.scriptics.com/ This site contains a variety of information about Tcl/Tk in general, the core Tcl and Tk distributions, the TclPro tool suite, and much more. Thank you for your contributions: --------------------------------- As usual, this release includes contributions from the Tcl community. We have a page honoring these contributions at: http://dev.scriptics.com/software/tcltk/contributors.html Summary of Changes since Tcl/Tk 8.4a1: -------------------------------------- The following were the main changes done in Tcl/Tk 8.4a1. A complete list can be found in the changes file at the root of the source tree. The more complete ChangeLog is also now included with each release. This is an alpha release, so it primarily included new features and performance enhancements. Below are only the most notable changes. 1. Added support for joinable threads. 2. Numerous performance enhancements: new, faster [string match] and [string map] algorithms; additional byte-compiled commands [return], [string] 3. New commands: [array statistics], [namespace exists]. 4. Extended [lsearch] to support faster searching on sorted lists and typed lists. 5. Better support for mingw compile environment. 6. Added -nocomplain support to [unset] to allow for silent unset operation. 7. Changed error return for procedures with incorrect args to be like the Tcl_WrongNumArgs API, with a "wrong # args: ..." message printed, with an args list. 8. New spinbox widget. 9. Support for -overrelief and -compound for labels, checkbuttons, radiobuttons, and command buttons. 10. Support for -repeatdelay, -repeatinterval for command buttons. 11. Added "readonly" state for entry widgets. 12. Replaced bgerror dialog with an enhanced version that can be easily customized to save stack traces to disk, email them, etc. 13. Added -nice option to [bell] command. 14. Added support for scripted documents by adding an explicit check for the EOF char \32 (^Z) in Tcl_EvalFile/[source]. 15. Added "eq" and "ne" operators to [expr], to perform explicit string equality/inequality tests. 16. Updated, corrected, extended documentation. 17. New [clipboard get] command, synonymous to [selection get -selection CLIPBOARD]. 18. Extended [array names] with -regexp, -exact, and -glob options, to control the type of pattern matching used. 19. Added ability to set the info script return value [info script ?newFileName?]. -- The Tcl Core Team Ajuba Solutions Jeffrey Hobbs Eric Melski jeffrey.hobbs at ajubasolutions.com ericm at ajubasolutions.com