Yes. Yes it is.
> What is the rationale for the current design?
These tcltest package options are essentially unchanged since they
were introduced in 1999 as part of the effort to transform a
collection of utility scripts into a formal package.
http://core.tcl.tk/tcl/info/f368875e9c462dbc
At that time, Tcl development was done by Scriptics and the checkin
is labeled as coming from a user "jenn". With that data, you might
track down the person and they might recall what the design thinking
was.
It's possible that the design matched some coding practice that was
in use within Scriptics. That would be the kind assumption.
But given just how boneheaded to the point of unusability you
demonstrated it to be, I suspect these features were just added without
any use cases or test cases or actual need, just because it seemed
like the sort of thing needed to flesh out a collection of utility
scripts into a 'finished' package.
After that, our community ethic of really trying not to break compat
just in case someone's counting on things being as they are has done
the rest. As it happens, Tk does make use of this facility to add
in the Ttk set of tests, but only by using the default operations.
Not recommended.
--
| Don Porter Applied and Computational Mathematics Division |
|
donald...@nist.gov Information Technology Laboratory |
|
http://math.nist.gov/~DPorter/ NIST |
|______________________________________________________________________|