Tk 4.1a1 Release Announcement September 15, 1995 John Ousterhout Sun Microsystems, Inc. john.ousterhout@eng.sun.com This message is to announce new releases of the Tcl scripting language and the Tk toolkit. The new releases are Tcl 7.5a1 and Tk 4.1a1. The most important new feature in these releases is support for PCs and Macintoshes. Tcl 7.5a1 and Tk 4.1a1 should run on PCs under Win3.1 (with Win32s), Windows 95, or Windows NT. They should also run on both PowerMacs and 68K Macs. The releases are fairly complete functionally, but they still use the Motif look and feel. It will be 6 months or more before native look and feel becomes available for the PC and Mac. Aside from the Mac and PC ports, the main new features are in Tcl, which now has a "load" command for dynamic loading of binaries and an "interp" command that allows you to create additional interpreters and execute untrusted scripts using a generalization of Borenstein's and Rose's Safe-Tcl. See the "README" and "changes" files in the distributions for more detail on what has changed. The "a1" in the release names indicates that these are the first "alpha" releases. "Alpha" means that they are likely to have bugs and we do not promise to maintain backward compatibility between these releases and the eventual Tcl 7.5 and Tk 4.1 releases (we may make changes in new features during alpha and beta testing). In spite of this warning, the Unix versions of Tcl and Tk have very few changes relative to Tcl 7.4 and Tk 4.0, so we expect them to be fairly stable. Where to get the new releases: ------------------------------ Tk 4.0b4 and Tcl 7.4b4 are currently available from two FTP servers, ftp.smli.com (in the directory /pub/tcl) and ftp.cs.berkeley.edu (in the directory /ucb/tcl). The releases should appear on the usual mirror sites within a few days. The new releases are in the files tk4.1a1.tar.gz and tcl7.5a1.tar.gz (there are also .Z versions of these files). There is also a binary release for the PC in win41a1.exe. This file contains compiled versions of Tcl, Tk, and wish, along with libraries, demos, and manual pages (but no sources). The file is a self-extracting executable (run it and it installs everything). There will be a binary Macintosh release soon, but it isn't available yet (Ray Johnson is out of town for a week). We'll make another announcement as soon as Ray gets back in town and cuts the binaries. For additional information: --------------------------- There is a set of Web pages on Tcl and Tk maintained by the Tcl/Tk group at Sun Laboratories. They can be accessed via the following URL: http://www.sunlabs.com/research/tcl Credits: -------- Although I'm posting this message, I had little to do with the new additions except for the "load" command. Credit for the PC port goes to Scott Stanton (scott.stanton@eng.sun.com) and credit for the Macintosh port goes to Ray Johnson (raymond.johnson@eng.sun.com). Bug reports should go to them (or, better yet, to comp.lang.tcl). The new "interp" command is the handiwork of Jacob Levy (jacob.levy@eng.sun.com).