October 27, 2003
Tcl-URL! - 2003/10/27 by John Seal

John Seal

Want to keep up on the latest in Tcl? There's no better way than subscribing to "Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL!: The Weekly Guide to Tcl Resources." These weekly postings will keep you up-to-date on the latest conferences, papers, releases, links, and more core information about Tcl. DDJ is proud to be associated with the Tcl-URL! team that launched this valuable project.

 "The safe method will probably seem bizarre and un-straightforward to those new to Tcl."?Aric Bills

 "Basically, Tcl is such a nice "glue" language that there exists lots of extensions for interfacing a Tcl script to code developed in other languages. Then you can use the simpler syntax of Tcl and frameworks like tcltest to create tests much quicker and easier (and with less chance of errors creeping into the test suite itself) than many other languages."?Ken Jones

POTW:

 XOTclIDE 0.53 by Artur Trzewik. "XOTclIDE is an (Integrated Development Environment) for XOTcl . XOTcl is an object oriented extension for Tcl. XOTcl can also manage old
Tcl code (procs)". "XOTclIDE is suggested and inspired by some great Smalltalk graphical environment systems as Squeak or Envy."

 http://www.xdobry.de/xotclIDE/

When using [grid], remember that rows and columns expand to hold the largest widget; if you want them to be bigger than that you'll have to use -weight to distribute the extra space:

 http://groups.google.com/groups?th=85a2cd5350a46469

TIP #161 results in torn feelings about tearoff menus:

 http://groups.google.com/groups?th=4c02c173404370f3

Redirecting stdout is discussed for the umpteenth time:

 http://groups.google.com/groups?th=2e137859d1c0d6ba

Watching a process and restarting it if it dies:

 http://groups.google.com/groups?th=394f9c1aba40af63

We've got "uncde", do we need an "ungnome" too?

 http://groups.google.com/groups?th=1da8ed3a3a237d07

Apparently I'm not the only C extension writer who's wondered when refcount management
is automatic, and when it's not. Keeping it all straight requires a lot of RTFM!

 http://groups.google.com/groups?th=90f3cf48fe847265 Thanks to Arjen Markus for his summary of recent Wiki activity:

 There are a lot of pages this week that have something to do with "languages", so let us start with those:

Tcl and other programming languages:

http://wiki.tcl.tk/9563 puts a Tcl interpreter into C# applications

http://wiki.tcl.tk/605 extends Tcl via C++ (it shows a prototype extension which could
do with a bit more work, hint, hint)

And of course, there is good, old C: http://wiki.tcl.tk/10161 uses that via the development environment "Bwise" to do some imagery ...

Tcl in various environments:

UNIX terminals have more settings than Tcl currently recognises, until TIP #160 gets implemented, you can use this little extension.

 http://wiki.tcl.tk/3347

We all know the Tcl-only web server, tclhttpd, right? Some discussion about how to make it even better at http://wiki.tcl.tk/10198
DOS may be all but forgotten, yet is possible to run Tcl on it:

 http://wiki.tcl.tk/10257 for the what and where...

Tcl and its syntax:

If we get {expand}, then we need a new rule. Here is a suggestion for the extended version of the Endecalogue: the Dodecalogue -

 http://wiki.tcl.tk/10259

 (Hm, if we could draw text in 3D, we might put it on a Aristotelean polyhedron ...)

 Well, in any case: it is open to comments!

Braces and expressions: is this a never-ending story too?

 http://wiki.tcl.tk/10225 demonstrates a few cases ...

Tcl and natural languages:

Have a look at http://wiki.tcl.tk/10261 and http://wiki.tcl.tk/10262 for a few smiles on Richard S's experiments with natural language processing.

Tcl and games:

Sure, the Wiki holds a lot of them. I like this version of Sokoban:

 http://wiki.tcl.tk/7847, if only for it's graphics

And now the finale:

With special recommendation: Stefan Vogel's administration interface for Metakit databases using Tclhttpd (yes the same).

 http://wiki.tcl.tk/10241 holds the story and a pretty picture.