Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL! - weekly Tcl news and links (Sep 11)
John Seal
congratulate RS on press release
QOTW: "It's always good to be precise (even better to be precise _and_
correct)." -- Aric Bills
"One of the more appealing point[s] of Tcl is that when you follow the
evident way you are on the right way and Tcl does what you wanted (I love
Tcl for that). But [in some] places, sometimes, the evident way is the
wrong way and Tcl doesn't do what you wanted." -- ulis
POTW: SMC - State Machine Compiler v. 2.2.0 by Charles Rapp. "SMC takes
a state machine description (stored in a .sm file) and generates State
pattern classes in a target language (C++, Java and Tcl are currently
supported)."
http://smc.sourceforge.net
In the mood for a little Snack? I'd offer you some wine and cheese,
but all my wine glasses are broken! John Cohn is trying to break
wine glasses with sound, but hasn't reported any results yet:
http://groups.google.com/groups?th=bb54ab607d3ab182
The tail of this thread (started in 1994!) points out ways to avoid
all those "global" calls in your procedures (which newbies seem to
hate), and refers to the wiki pages about CONST and static local
variables. Nowadays we've got "::" and namespaces, though:
http://groups.google.com/groups?th=cd3e3422bdf295cd
Congratulations to 2003 Tcl Activators' Choice Award-winner Richard
Suchenwirth, who, coincidentally, just keeps producing and donating
(see Wiki report, below) the delightful source code for which he's
renowned.
http://www.activestate.com/Corporate/Communications/Releases/Press1061841859.html
There are non-obvious pitfalls if you're trying to implement web
browser-like link highlighting in a text widget:
http://groups.google.com/groups?th=a37d1d03e37ed917
"Creating" and "defining" a variable are two different things,
and it gets pretty confusing when "upvar" enters the picture:
http://groups.google.com/groups?th=566e8d29cdd4034
http://groups.google.com/groups?th=81a8972fd8fa8af8
Tcl can still count to 10 with six functions tied behind its back!
http://groups.google.com/groups?th=8ffdb47edc0ba85f
Thanks to Arjen Markus for his summary of recent Wiki activity:
Dear me, a busy week at the Wiki: your chronicler picked out a wide
variety of pages as a consequence, from one-liners to (more or less) complete
debuggers. Let us get started!
Techniques
- An interactive debugger for Tcl/Tk can be found via
<http://wiki.tcl.tk/9712>
- The everlasting story of window icons: this page describes the situation
on KDE, <http://wiki.tcl.tk/9795>
- Another frequently asked question: how can I manipulate an image without
the need for Tk (and a proper display)? Well, <http://wiki.tcl.tk/1729>
provides an overview of the possibilities and <http://wiki.tcl.tk/9775>
is one particular solution using ImageMagick.
- Here are some experimental graphical algorithms: <http://wiki.tcl.tk/9776>
- And a potentially interesting page, <http://wiki.tcl.tk/9749> tries to
provide an overview of the issues of handling user data... Yes, this
is an invitation to contribute.
Useful applications
- Clean up your bookmarks - <http://wiki.tcl.tk/9787>
- Want to know the weather? Try <http://wiki.tcl.tk/9766>
- One old page revisited: a file properties dialogue,
<http://wiki.tcl.tk/1025>
- And an old application revisited, a binary image editor reimplemented,
<http://wiki.tcl.tk/9755>
Fun stuff
- An old design for a water clock revived via modern graphics:
<http://wiki.tcl.tk/9758>
- A Japanese abacus on a tiny pocket computer: <http://wiki.tcl.tk/9377>
- And last but not least: what you can do with one-line programs in Tcl/Tk:
<http://wiki.tcl.tk/9770> shows a surprising collection!
Everything Tcl-related you want is probably one or two clicks away in these
pages:
The "Welcome to comp.lang.tcl" message by Andreas Kupries
http://www.purl.org/net/tcl-welcome
The Tcl Developer Site is Tcl's "home base".
http://www.tcl.tk
Larry Virden maintains a comp.lang.tcl FAQ launcher
http://www.purl.org/NET/Tcl-FAQ/
The Tcl Developer Xchange is a highly organized resource center
of documents and software with provisions for individuals to
maintain references to their own software:
http://www.tcl.tk/resource/
The TDX sponsor, ActiveState, also keeps info to convince your
boss Tcl is a good thing
http://www.tcl.tk/scripting/
The Tcl'ers Wiki is a huge, dynamic, collaboratively edited repository
of documentation, examples, tutorials and pontifications on all things
Tcl.
http://wiki.tcl.tk/0
For the ideal overview of the topics about Tcl most likely to
interest a newcomer, see "Arts and Crafts ..."
http://wiki.tcl.tk/969
ActiveState maintains binaries distribution and development tools
http://www.activestate.com/Tcl
along with a Cookbook of Tcl recipes
http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Tcl
Cameron Laird tracks several Tcl/Tk references of interest
http://phaseit.net/claird/comp.lang.tcl/
Cetus Links maintains a Tcl/Tk page with verified links
http://www.cetus-links.org/oo_tcl_tk.html
Google Groups archives comp.lang.tcl.announce posts
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/tcl_announce/
Previous - (U)se the (R)esource, (L)uke! - messages are listed here:
http://www.ddj.com/topics/tclurl/
An alternative is
http://groups.google.com/groups?oi=3Ddjq&as_q=3D+Tcl-URL!&as_ugroup=3Dcom=
p.lang.tcl
Suggestions/corrections for next week's posting are always welcome.
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--
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sponsor the "Tcl-URL!" project.
Mark A. Wege
>
> Techniques
> - An interactive debugger for Tcl/Tk can be found via
> <http://wiki.tcl.tk/9712>
When I went to look at this code last week after this message came out, the
page was basically empty.
I just looked again, and it is still empty. Is there a way of tracking what
happened to the contents of the page, and of restoring the missing contents?
lvi...@yahoo.com
According to Mark A. Wege <mw...@csc.com>:
:John Seal wrote:
:>
:> Techniques
:> - An interactive debugger for Tcl/Tk can be found via
:> <http://wiki.tcl.tk/9712>
:
:When I went to look at this code last week after this message came out, the
:page was basically empty.
The reference was wrong - it was supposed to be http://wiki.tcl.tk/RamDebugger
--
<URL: http://wiki.tcl.tk/ > <URL: http://www.tcl.tk/ >
Even if explicitly stated to the contrary, nothing in this posting
should be construed as representing my employer's opinions.
<URL: mailto:lvi...@yahoo.com > <URL: http://www.purl.org/NET/lvirden/ >