From: markd@NeoSoft.com (Mark Diekhans)
Subject: New Extended Tcl Available
Organization: NeoSoft Communications Services -- (713) 684-5900
Date: Sat, 17 Oct 1992 00:26:50 GMT

The latest versions of Extended Tcl is now available from: 

 barkley.berkeley.edu:tcl/extensions/tclX6.4c.tar.Z

Please mail us at:

         tcl-project@NeoSoft.com

if you have any questions, comments or problems.

markd@grizzly.com

WHAT IS EXTENDED TCL
====================

    Extended Tcl (TclX), defines a set of extensions to Tcl 6.4, the Tool
Command Language invented by Dr. John Ousterhout of the University of
California at Berkeley.  Tcl is a powerful, yet simple embeddable programming
language.  Extended Tcl is oriented towards system programming tasks, with
many additional interfaces to the Unix operating system, It is upwardly
compatible with Tcl 6.4.  You take the Extended Tcl package, add it to Tcl
6.4, and from that you get Extended Tcl.  (Berkeley Tcl is not included in
this distribution, obtain it from sprite.berkeley.edu).

   Support is also included for building a Tk wish shell with the Extended Tcl
command set.

   As with Berkeley Tcl, all of Extended Tcl is freely redistributable,
including for commercial use and resale.


FEATURES ADDED BY EXTENDED TCL
==============================

   Here is a summary of the features added by Extended Tcl.  For more details
on the commands and functionality provided by Extended Tcl, see the manual
page man/TclX.man.

    o A shell, which provides an environment for developing and executing
      Tcl programs.  

    o Advanced Tcl code library facility.

    o General purpose commands which define new programming constructs,
      debugging and profiling facilities.

    o Unix access commands provide access to many Unix system calls, including
      process management.

    o File I/O commands provided added facilities for accessing and
      manipulating open files.

    o File scanning facility that provides awk-like functionality.

    o Math commands (random, sin, cos, etc).

    o Extended list manipulation commands

    o Keyed lists, a type of list that provided functionality similar to C
      structures.

    o Extended string and character manipulation commands.


NEW FEATURES IN THIS RELEASE
============================

    o All known bugs are fixed.

    o Configuration has been simplified.

    o Improved support for Tk.  Including building a wish with signal support
      and building a Tk package library.

    o All floating point functions (sin, cos, etc).  Now take expressions
      as arguments.  Floating point numbers will not be demoted to integers
      or lose precision.

    o The standard Tcl expr command is patched so that floating point numbers
      do not get demoted to integers or lose precision.  This patch has been
      submitted to John Ousterhout.

    o The character string manipulation commands take integer expressions
      for positions and lengths.

    o The performance of the loading of package library indices and the
      loading of packages from the libraries has been improved.

    o A performance profiling facility has been added.

    o The alarm command will take fractions of a second on systems with the
      setitimer system call.

    o Fcntl and fstat are easier to use.

    o Better signal handling on systems with Posix signals.


Newsgroups: comp.lang.tcl