Tcl-URL! Weekly Tcl News and Links (July 8)
Jul 09, 2002, 07:00 (0 Talkback[s])
QOTW: "I am more amazed that more people do not seem to be aware of the
speed of getting an 'idea' up and running in Tcl/Tk. I wonder if with
all the media and promotion (about 5 or more glossy mags) of Java, that
people are just not aware of how useful Tcl/Tk can be? It seems to me
that much of what people use Java for can be done in Tcl/Tk. I found
that doing simple things in Tcl/Tk runs so much faster in 'runtime'
than Java on my old computer 200MHz." getwell4u
http://groups.google.com/groups?as_umsgid=3d2337df.3456629@news.bcsupernet.com
"With rather more experience than I'd prefer, the problem with Java is
really that often not only is it taking a sledgehammer to crack a nut,
it's a red inflatable squeaky sledgehammer with a picture of a cartoon
character on it..." Donal K. Fellows
http://groups.google.com/groups?as_umsgid=3D243F5A.787C074D@cs.man.ac.uk
"If so many people are interested in a working expect on windows with all
the features, why hasn't anyone contracted with ActiveState to have them
create it or done it themselves?" David Gravereaux
Proceedings of the 3rd European Tcl/Tk user meeting are now avail-
able! Many thanks to Michael Haschek for putting them online:
http://www.t-ide.com/tcl2002e.html
http://groups.google.com/groups?as_umsgid=70ab80f9.0207051256.243ce0a5@posting.google.com
Here's a challenge: figure out which Tcl programmer most deserves
an Active Award. Voting for one of
John Almirante
Vincent Darley
Kevin B. Kenny
Richard Suchenwirth
Jean-Claude Wippler
closes 17 July 2002.
http://www.ActiveState.com/ActiveAwards2002
New TIP: #105 "Add Prefix Matching for Switch"
http://purl.org/tcl/tip/105.html
Discussion
http://groups.google.com/groups?th=e6dd2061fb93e67d
Zoran Vasiljevic explains inter-thread communication techniques:
http://groups.google.com/groups?as_umsgid=4247cd6d.0206290127.47880cc4@posting.google.com
Don Porter talks about recent changes in the msgcat package:
http://groups.google.com/groups?as_umsgid=slrnahuk0a.94n.dgp@clover.cam.nist.gov
Radical Language Modification: George Peter Staplin describes an
experiment that adds type-checking to Tcl. Many comments follow.
http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=3D1F57A7.9E1FCD55%40XMission.com
George Howlett explains how to link BLT vectors and C arrays,
and provides sample code to do so:
http://groups.google.com/groups?as_umsgid=ui2gh2geldqi7c@corp.supernews.com
Tcl/Tk Testimonial: "I will be taking a more seriously look
into Tcl/Tk. It seems that Tcl/Tk does 'multi-platform'
write once and run everywhere better than Java without
being too slow on older computers."
http://groups.google.com/groups?as_umsgid=3d2337df.3456629@news.bcsupernet.com
Thanks to Arjen Markus for this summary:
A fruitful two weeks on the Wiki, judging from the number of pages
that have changed. In these two weeks in Europe there was the
Third Tcl/Tk User meeting, with lots of interesting stuff,
http://wiki.tcl.tk/3043
including live chats and real beer. Thanks to Michael Haschek.
Let us try to group all the information:
General:
- Scripted documents are the subject of
http://wiki.tcl.tk/3659
what they are and how they relate to other things not Tcl.
- The wishlist for Tcl 9.0 is growing - catch up on the latest items,
at
http://wiki.tcl.tk/883
- Those great extensions and applications sometimes get orphaned, for
various reasons. The orphanage is there to find them new maintainers,
http://wiki.tcl.tk/3587
Interesting user-interface items:
- Creating widgets with BWidgets is explained at
http://wiki.tcl.tk/1916
- Mike Doyle played with a miniature database manager and came up with
a local and a WWW one,
http://wiki.tcl.tk/3610
http://wiki.tcl.tk/3636
- In need for multibyte-multilingual input? Here is "taiku",
http://wiki.tcl.tk/3145
Open database connection (ODBC) is discussed at
http://wiki.tcl.tk/2151
in relation to "tclodbc".
Lots of information for the programmer:
- Object orientation is a recurring theme
http://wiki.tcl.tk/970
lists a lot of the Tcl solutions.
- You may add a few discusions about integrated development environments,
http://wiki.tcl.tk/3599
- How to combine Tcl/Tk and an application in C?
http://wiki.tcl.tk/3474
lists various approaches.
Techniques for manipulating text:
- The doctools documentation tools are described in some detail
at
http://wiki.tcl.tk/3054
but see the links in that page.
- tDOM,
http://wiki.tcl.tk/1948
is an extension that deals with XML, XPath with a speed that
no one should be ashamed of.
- Talking of XML, why not try TclSOAP?
http://wiki.tcl.tk/1753
might interest you as well.
Cool algorithms:
- You can build a decision tree, from the roots up, by listing a
couple of facts,
http://wiki.tcl.tk/3563
- Not only big trees can be built in Tcl, you can go down to the
individual bits as well
http://wiki.tcl.tk/3331
- And should you need more, take a look at the gems in this page,
http://wiki.tcl.tk/918
Everything 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
Larry Virden maintains a comp.lang.tcl FAQ launcher
http://www.purl.org/NET/Tcl-FAQ/
Brent Welch maintains "The Tcl Developer Xchange", a highly
organized resource center of documents and software with
provisions for individuals to "set up a link to your software
and update ... as you release new versions."
http://www.tcl-tk.net/resource/
The Xchange sponsor also keeps info to convince your boss Tcl
is a good thing
http://www.tcl-tk.net/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 Tools maintains a Cookbook of Tcl recipes
http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Tcl
NeoSoft has a comp.lang.tcl contributed sources archive
http://www.neosoft.com/tcl/contributed-software/
Cameron Laird tracks many Tcl/Tk references of interest
http://starbase.neosoft.com/~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://purl.org/thecliff/tcl/url.html
--in principal. In spring 2001, though,
http://www.ddj.com/topics/tclurl/
http://tcl.activestate.com:8004/tclurl/
are more consistently up-to-date. A fourth possibility is
http://groups.google.com/groups?oi=djq&as_q=+Tcl-URL!&as_ugroup=comp.lang.tcl
Suggestions/corrections for next week's posting are always welcome.
To receive a new issue of this posting in e-mail each Monday, ask
<claird@neosoft.com> to subscribe. Be sure to mention "Tcl-URL!".
--
Dr. Dobb's Journal (http://www.ddj.com) is pleased to participate in and
sponsor the "Tcl-URL!" project.
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