Tcl-URL! Weekly Tcl News and Links (July 1)

QOTW:  "Rule #1 of Tcl Semantics: The Semantics of Tcl are Based on Strings."
-- Donal K. Fellows

"Sometimes people ask questions here about calling TK (TK!!) functions
from their C code. Heaven forbid. Why would I want to build my GUI
from within my C code, when doing it in plain ol' Tcl is so easy?"
        --Helmut Giese, <3d1cbb2b.8448636@News.CIS.DFN.DE>

"Discretion is the hardest part of programming, worse even than
documentation and regression testing."  --Donal K. Fellows

"A failed engineering consensus is a poor reason to add configuration
options."  --Kevin Kenny 


    The 3rd Tcl'Europe conference took place June 27-28 in Munich.
    Those of us who weren't there are all anxiously awaiting
    conference reports!
        http://www.t-ide.com/meeting.htm

    Lots of new releases announced on Monday, starting with new ActiveTcl
    stable (based on 8.3.4) and beta releases (based on 8.4).  The latter
    is an 8.4b1 release candidate -- try it out, pound on it, try
    to get it to break.
        http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Downloads/ActiveTcl/
        http://groups.google.com/groups?as_umsgid=3D1781EF.53695020@ActiveState.com
        http://groups.google.com/groups?as_umsgid=3D178313.D8E80477@ActiveState.com
        http://www.tcl.tk/man/tcl8.4/TclCmd/contents.htm          

    Jochen Loewer announces tDOM 0.7.1: "Finally tDOM reached
    a state of compliance and performance that could compete
    or even outperform other XML/SAX/DOM(+Ns)/XPath/XSLT
    processors like libxml, Microsoft XML, Oracle XML, ..."
    Source and Windows binary distributions are available.
        http://sdf.lonestar.org/~loewerj/tdom.cgi
        http://groups.google.com/groups?as_umsgid=ef361324d0172a8cdb6fc36c7e0903c2.45023@mygate.mailgate.org

    The weekly moodss release, up to version 16.3 now:
        http://jfontain.free.fr/
        http://groups.google.com/groups?as_umsgid=4244613b.0206232335.cb3023c@posting.google.com

    Sergio Basto announces wishgl 1.0.1.3 (draft), an OpenGL binding to Tk:
        http://wishgl2.sf.net
        http://groups.google.com/groups?as_umsgid=3D174AEF.20602@aeiou.pt

    Michael A. Cleverly and others present a tutorial on how to think 
    about regular expressions productively.
        http://groups.google.com/groups?th=a723ad31ea3fb4fa

    Chang Li announces xWizard 2.0, a GUI for generating C/C++
    template code for Tcl extensions.
        http://www.neatware.com/myrmecox/enterprise/wizard.html
        http://groups.google.com/groups?as_umsgid=d5224ea3.0206241222.3e4bf466@posting.google.com

    Jason Tang released tclweather:
        http://wiki.tcl.tk/tclweather
    Other weather apps discussed in this thread:
        http://groups.google.com/groups?th=db8a7ebaa1f61ee7

    New on the Wiki: The Orphanage is now open.  Check here for
    packages looking for a new maintainer or to be reunited with
    an old one.
        http://mini.net/tcl/Orphanage

    Lots of suggestions for managing large, complex information
    sets are given in this thread:
        http://groups.google.com/groups?th=2a47a65edf75479a

    Embedding Tcl in C versus Extending Tcl with C:
        http://groups.google.com/groups?th=baa1fedaa411434d

    Donal K. Fellows gives good advice for writing custom Tcl_ObjTypes:
        http://groups.google.com/groups?as_umsgid=3D184970.54D757E3@cs.man.ac.uk

    A discussion on TIP #103 "Argument Expansion Command".  What is
    it good for?  Is it really needed?
    TIP 103:
        http://purl.org/tcl/tip/103.html
    Best argument against:
        http://groups.google.com/groups?as_umsgid=yfifzzgyput.fsf@triumf.ca
    Best argument in favor:
        http://groups.google.com/groups?as_umsgid=3D1A03A8.2634EAF4@space.se
    Full thread:
        http://groups.google.com/groups?th=9e77d5836b06ab1b
    Best quote:
        'A very good example of the wonders of argument expansion with eval.
        You have to know about and deal with things like canonical-form
        lists to be safe, and in the end you still go, "It's safe.  I think."'
        -- Peter Spjuth, <3D184886.27D98C56@space.se>

    A long and occasionally testy thread on memory allocation, as
    manifested in such commands as [append], largely terminates in 
    excellent analytic summaries by Kevin Kenny, Eric Melski, and
    others.
        http://groups.google.com/groups?th=937a8d0d3d858007


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.

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