tcl-8.6.10

[Douglas R. Reno]

New point version

[Bruce Dubbs]

Highlights of Tcl 8.6

Object Oriented Programming: The commands of the TclOO package are now part of Tcl itself. This gives Tcl a built-in object system that is fully dynamic, class-based, and includes advanced features such as meta-classes, filters, and mixins.

New version 4 of the popular package Itcl (aka incr Tcl) is also included, now built on a TclOO foundation, granting support for some traditional OO Tcl programming out of the box as well.

Stackless Evaluation: The evaluation of many levels of nested proc calls are no longer implemented as a stack of nested C routine calls. This revision in the internal implementation of Tcl evaluation makes deep recursion in Tcl scripts safe to do. But there's more...

This new implementation enables a collection of new commands, coroutine, tailcall, yield, and yieldto that provide profound new capabilities and models of concurrency to Tcl scripts.

Enhanced Exceptions: New commands try and throw and a wealth of new -errorcode values enable far more precise trapping and handling of exceptions using a familiar construct.

Batteries Included: Tcl delivers in the pkgs subdirectory a bundled collection of third-party packages built and installed along with Tcl.

Thread-enabled Operations: A thread-enabled default build, a bundled Thread package, and new command interp cancel make Tcl 8.6 ready for your multi-threaded programming tasks.

SQL Database Powered: The bundled Tcl DataBase Connectivity (tdbc) interface package makes it possible to write your SQL database-powered scripts decoupled from any particular database engine. The bundled sqlite3 and tdbc::sqlite3 packages supply a powerful and popular SQL database engine ready to use.

IPv6 Networking: Both client and server sockets support IPv6 where platform support exists.

Built-in Zlib Compression: New command zlib provides utilities to handle compression of data and streams.

List Processing: New commands lmap and dict map enable the elegant expression of transformations over Tcl containers.

Stacked Channels by Script: New commands chan push and chan pop expose the power of stacked channels without the need to write C code.

Additional New Features: Temporary file creation, enhancements to list sorting and setting, dict filtering, half-close of bidirectional channels, encoding and decoding of binary sequences, finer control over load, and many many more.

[Bruce Dubbs]

Fixed at revision 11702.