Recent user-visible changes to Tcl: 1. No more [command1] [command2] construct for grouping multiple commands on a single command line. 2. Semi-colon now available for grouping commands on a line. 3. For a command to span multiple lines, must now use backslash-return at the end of each line but the last. 4. "Var" command has been changed to "set". 5. Double-quotes now available as an argument grouping character. 6. "Return" may be used at top-level. 7. More backslash sequences available now. In particular, backslash-newline may be used to join lines in command files. 8. New or modified built-in commands: case, return, for, glob, info, print, return, set, source, string, uplevel. 9. After an error, the variable "errorInfo" is filled with a stack trace showing what was being executed when the error occurred. 10. Command abbreviations are accepted when parsing commands, but are not recommended except for purely-interactive commands. 11. $, set, and expr all complain now if a non-existent variable is referenced. 12. History facilities exist now. See Tcl.man and Tcl_RecordAndEval.man. 13. Changed to distinguish between empty variables and those that don't exist at all. Interfaces to Tcl_GetVar and Tcl_ParseVar have changed (NULL return value is now possible). *** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY *** 14. Changed meaning of "level" argument to "uplevel" command (1 now means "go up one level", not "go to level 1"; "#1" means "go to level 1"). *** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY *** 15. 3/19/90 Added "info exists" option to see if variable exists. 16. 3/19/90 Added "noAbbrev" variable to prohibit command abbreviations. 17. 3/19/90 Added extra errorInfo option to "error" command. 18. 3/21/90 Double-quotes now only affect space: command, variable, and backslash substitutions still occur inside double-quotes. *** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY *** 19. 3/21/90 Added support for \r. 20. 3/21/90 List, concat, eval, and glob commands all expect at least one argument now. *** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY *** 21. 3/22/90 Added "?:" operators to expressions. 22. 3/25/90 Fixed bug in Tcl_Result that caused memory to get trashed. ------------------- Released version 3.1 --------------------- 23. 3/29/90 Fixed bug that caused "file a.b/c ext" to return ".b/c". 24. 3/29/90 Semi-colon is not treated specially when enclosed in double-quotes. ------------------- Released version 3.2 --------------------- 25. 4/16/90 Rewrote "exec" not to use select or signals anymore. Should be more Sys-V compatible, and no slower in the normal case. 26. 4/18/90 Rewrote "glob" to eliminate GNU code (there's no GNU code left in Tcl, now), and added Tcl_TildeSubst procedure. Added automatic tilde-substitution in many commands, including "glob". ------------------- Released version 3.3 --------------------- 27. 7/11/90 Added "Tcl_AppendResult" procedure. 28. 7/20/90 "History" with no options now defaults to "history info" rather than to "history redo". Although this is a backward incompatibility, it should only be used interactively and thus shouldn't present any compatibility problems with scripts. 29. 7/20/90 Added "Tcl_GetInteger", "Tcl_GetDouble", and "Tcl_GetBoolean" procedures. 30. 7/22/90 Removed "Tcl_WatchInterp" procedure: doesn't seem to be necessary, since the same effect can be achieved with the deletion callbacks on individual commands. *** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY *** 31. 7/23/90 Added variable tracing: Tcl_TraceVar, Tcl_UnTraceVar, and Tcl_VarTraceInfo procedures, "trace" command. 32. 8/9/90 Mailed out list of all bug fixes since 3.3 release. 33. 8/29/90 Fixed bugs in Tcl_Merge relating to backslashes and semi-colons. Mailed out patch. 34. 9/3/90 Fixed bug in tclBasic.c: quotes weren't quoting ]'s. Mailed out patch. 35. 9/19/90 Rewrote exec to always use files both for input and output to the process. The old pipe-based version didn't work if the exec'ed process forked a child and then exited: Tcl waited around for stdout to get closed, which didn't happen until the grandchild exited. 36. 11/5/90 ERR_IN_PROGRESS flag wasn't being cleared soon enough in Tcl_Eval, allowing error messages from different commands to pile up in $errorInfo. Fixed by re-arranging code in Tcl_Eval that re-initializes result and ERR_IN_PROGRESS flag. Didn't mail out patch: changes too complicated to describe. 37. 12/19/90 Added Tcl_VarEval procedure as a convenience for assembling and executing Tcl commands. 38. 1/29/91 Fixed core leak in Tcl_AddErrorInfo. Also changed procedure and Tcl_Eval so that first call to Tcl_AddErrorInfo need not come from Tcl_Eval. ----------------- Released version 5.0 with Tk ------------------ 39. 4/3/91 Removed change bars from manual entries, leaving only those that came after version 3.3 was released. 40. 5/17/91 Changed tests to conform to Mary Ann May-Pumphrey's approach. 41. 5/23/91 Massive revision to Tcl parser to simplify the implementation of string and floating-point support in expressions. Newlines inside [] are now treated as command separators rather than word separators (this makes newline treatment consistent throughout Tcl). *** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY *** 42. 5/23/91 Massive rewrite of expression code to support floating-point values and simple string comparisons. The C interfaces to expression routines have changed (Tcl_Expr is replaced by Tcl_ExprLong, Tcl_ExprDouble, etc.), but all old Tcl expression strings should be accepted by the new expression code. *** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY *** 43. 5/23/91 Modified tclHistory.c to check for negative "keep" value. 44. 5/23/91 Modified Tcl_Backslash to handle backslash-newline. It now returns 0 to indicate that a backslash sequence should be replaced by no character at all. *** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY *** 45. 5/29/91 Modified to use ANSI C function prototypes. Must set "USE_ANSI" switch when compiling to get prototypes. 46. 5/29/91 Completed test suite by providing tests for all of the built-in Tcl commands. 47. 5/29/91 Changed Tcl_Concat to eliminate leading and trailing white-space in each of the things it concatenates and to ignore elements that are empty or have only white space in them. This produces cleaner output from the "concat" command. *** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY *** 48. 5/31/91 Changed "set" command and Tcl_SetVar procedure to return new value of variable. 49. 6/1/91 Added "while" and "cd" commands. 50. 6/1/91 Changed "exec" to delete the last character of program output if it is a newline. In most cases this makes it easier to process program-generated output. *** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY *** 51. 6/1/91 Made sure that pointers are never used after freeing them. 52. 6/1/91 Fixed bug in TclWordEnd where it wasn't dealing with [] inside quotes correctly. 53. 6/8/91 Fixed exec.test to accept return values of either 1 or 255 from "false" command. 54. 7/6/91 Massive overhaul of variable management. Associative arrays now available, along with "unset" command (and Tcl_UnsetVar procedure). Variable traces have been completely reworked: interfaces different both from Tcl and C, and multiple traces may exist on same variable. Can no longer redefine existing local variable to be global. Calling sequences have changed slightly for Tcl_GetVar and Tcl_SetVar ("global" is now "flags"). Tcl_SetVar can fail and return a NULL result. New forms of variable-manipulation procedures: Tcl_GetVar2, Tcl_SetVar2, etc. Syntax of variable $-notation changed to support array indexing. *** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY *** 55. 7/6/91 Added new list-manipulation procedures: Tcl_ScanElement, Tcl_ConvertElement, Tcl_AppendElement. 56. 7/12/91 Created new procedure Tcl_EvalFile, which does most of the work of the "source" command. 57. 7/20/91 Major reworking of "exec" command to allow pipelines, more redirection, background. Added new procedures Tcl_Fork, Tcl_WaitPids, Tcl_DetachPids, and Tcl_CreatePipeline. The old "< input" notation has been replaced by "<< input" ("<" is for redirection from a file). Also handles error returns and abnormal terminations (e.g. signals) differently. *** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY *** 58. 7/21/91 Added "append" and "lappend" commands. 59. 7/22/91 Reworked error messages and manual entries to use ?x? as the notation for an optional argument x, instead of [x]. The bracket notation was often confused with the use of brackets for command substitution. Also modified error messages to be more consistent. 60. 7/23/91 Tcl_DeleteCommand now returns an indication of whether or not the command actually existed, and the "rename" command uses this information to return an error if an attempt is made to delete a non-existent command. *** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY *** 61. 7/25/91 Added new "errorCode" mechanism, along with procedures Tcl_SetErrorCode, Tcl_UnixError, and Tcl_ResetResult. Renamed Tcl_Return to Tcl_SetResult, but left a #define for Tcl_Return to avoid compatibility problems. 62. 7/26/91 Extended "case" command with alternate syntax where all patterns and commands are together in a single list argument: makes it easier to write multi-line case statements. 63. 7/27/91 Changed "print" command to perform tilde-substitution on the file name. 64. 7/27/91 Added "tolower", "toupper", "trim", "trimleft", and "trimright" options to "string" command. 65. 7/29/91 Added "atime", "mtime", "size", and "stat" options to "file" command. 66. 8/1/91 Added "split" and "join" commands. 67. 8/11/91 Added commands for file I/O, including "open", "close", "read", "gets", "puts", "flush", "eof", "seek", and "tell". 68. 8/14/91 Switched to use a hash table for command lookups. Command abbreviations no longer have direct support in the Tcl interpreter, but it should be possible to simulate them with the auto-load features described below. The "noAbbrev" variable is no longer used by Tcl. *** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY *** 68.5 8/15/91 Added support for "unknown" command, which can be used to complete abbreviations, auto-load library files, auto-exec shell commands, etc. 69. 8/15/91 Added -nocomplain switch to "glob" command. 70. 8/20/91 Added "info library" option and TCL_LIBRARY #define. Also added "info script" option. 71. 8/20/91 Changed "file" command to take "option" argument as first argument (before file name), for consistency with other Tcl commands. *** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY *** 72. 8/20/91 Changed format of information in $errorInfo variable: comments such as ("while" body line 1) are now on separate lines from commands being executed. *** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY *** 73. 8/20/91 Changed Tcl_AppendResult so that it (eventually) frees large buffers that it allocates. 74. 8/21/91 Added "linsert", "lreplace", "lsearch", and "lsort" commands. 75. 8/28/91 Added "incr" and "exit" commands. 76. 8/30/91 Added "regexp" and "regsub" commands. 77. 9/4/91 Changed "dynamic" field in interpreters to "freeProc" (procedure address). This allows for alternative storage managers. *** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY *** 78. 9/6/91 Added "index", "length", and "range" options to "string" command. Added "lindex", "llength", and "lrange" commands. 79. 9/8/91 Removed "index", "length", "print" and "range" commands. "Print" is redundant with "puts", but less general, and the other commands are replaced with the new commands described in change 78 above. *** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY *** 80. 9/8/91 Changed history revision to occur even when history command is nested; needed in order to allow "history" to be invoked from "unknown" procedure. 81. 9/13/91 Changed "panic" not to use vfprintf (it's uglier and less general now, but makes it easier to run Tcl on systems that don't have vfprintf). Also changed "strerror" not to reclare sys_errlist. 82. 9/19/91 Lots of changes to improve portability to different UNIX systems, including addition of "config" script to adapt Tcl to the configuration of the system it's being compiled on. 83. 9/22/91 Added "pwd" command. 84. 9/22/91 Renamed manual pages so that their filenames are no more than 14 characters in length, moved to "doc" subdirectory. 85. 9/24/91 Redid manual entries so they contain the supplemental macros that they need; can just print with "troff -man" or "man" now. 86. 9/26/91 Created initial version of script library, including a version of "unknown" that does auto-loading, auto-execution, and abbreviation expansion. This library is used by tclTest automatically. See the "library" manual entry for details. ----------------- Released version 6.0, 9/26/91 ------------------ 87. 9/30/91 Made "string tolower" and "string toupper" check case before converting: on some systems, "tolower" and "toupper" assume that character already has particular case. 88. 9/30/91 Fixed bug in Tcl_SetResult: wasn't always setting freeProc correcly when called with NULL value. This tended to cause memory allocation errors later. 89. 10/3/91 Added "upvar" command. 90. 10/4/91 Changed "format" so that internally it converts %D to %ld, %U to %lu, %O to %lo, and %F to %f. This eliminates some compatibility problems on some machines without affecting behavior. 91. 10/10/91 Fixed bug in "regsub" that caused core dumps with the -all option when the last match wasn't at the end of the string. 92. 10/17/91 Fixed problems with backslash sequences: \r support was incomplete and \f and \v weren't supported at all. 93. 10/24/91 Added Tcl_InitHistory procedure. 94. 10/24/91 Changed "regexp" to store "-1 -1" in subMatchVars that don't match, rather than returning an error. 95. 10/27/91 Modified "regexp" to return actual strings in matchVar and subMatchVars instead of indices. Added "-indices" switch to cause indices to be returned. *** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY *** 96. 10/27/91 Fixed bug in "scan" where it used hardwired constants for sizes of floats and doubles instead of using "sizeof". 97. 10/31/91 Fixed bug in tclParse.c where parse-related error messages weren't being storage-managed correctly, causing spurious free's. 98. 10/31/91 Form feed and vertical tab characters are now considered to be space characters by the parser. 99. 10/31/91 Added TCL_LEAVE_ERR_MSG flag to procedures like Tcl_SetVar. 100. 11/7/91 Fixed bug in "case" where "in" argument couldn't be ommitted if all case branches were embedded in a single list. 101. 11/7/91 Switched to use "pid_t" and "uid_t" and other official POSIC types and function prototypes. ----------------- Released version 6.1, 11/7/91 ------------------ 102. 12/2/91 Modified Tcl_ScanElement and Tcl_ConvertElement in several ways. First, allowed caller to request that only backslashes be used (no braces). Second, made Tcl_ConvertElement more aggressive in using backslashes for braces and quotes. 103. 12/5/91 Added "type", "lstat", and "readlink" options to "file" command, plus added new "type" element to output of "stat" and "lstat" options. 104. 12/10/91 Manual entries had first lines that caused "man" program to try weird preprocessor. Added blank comment lines to fix problem. 105. 12/16/91 Fixed a few bugs in auto_mkindex proc: wasn't handling errors properly, and hadn't been upgraded for new "regexp" syntax. 106. 1/2/92 Fixed bug in "file" command where it didn't properly handle a file names containing tildes where the indicated user doesn't exist. 107. 1/2/92 Fixed lots of cases in tclUnixStr.c where two different errno symbols (e.g. EWOULDBLOCK and EAGAIN) have the same number; Tcl will only use one of them. 108. 1/2/92 Lots of changes to configuration script to handle many more systems more gracefully. E.g. should now detect the bogus strtoul that comes with AIX and substitute Tcl's own version instead. ----------------- Released version 6.2, 1/10/92 ------------------ 109. 1/20/92 Config didn't have code to actually use "uid_t" variable to set TCL_UIT_T #define. 110. 2/10/92 Tcl_Eval didn't properly reset "numLevels" variable when too-deep recursion occurred. 111. 2/29/92 Added "on" and "off" to keywords accepted by Tcl_GetBoolean. 112. 3/19/92 Config wasn't installing default version of strtod.c for systems that don't have one in libc.a. 113. 3/23/92 Fixed bug in tclExpr.c where numbers with leading "."s, like 0.75, couldn't be properly substituted into expressions with variable or command substitution. 114. 3/25/92 Fixed bug in tclUnixAZ.c where "gets" command wasn't checking to make sure that it was able to write the variable OK. 115. 4/16/92 Fixed bug in tclUnixAZ.c where "read" command didn't compute file size right for device files. 116. 4/23/92 Fixed but in tclCmdMZ.c where "trace vinfo" was overwriting the trace command. ----------------- Released version 6.3, 5/1/92 ------------------ 117. 5/1/92 Added Tcl_GlobalEval. 118. 6/1/92 Changed auto-load facility to source files at global level. 119. 6/8/92 Tcl_ParseVar wasn't always setting termPtr after errors, which sometimes caused core dumps. 120. 6/21/92 Fixed bug in initialization of regexp pattern cache. This bug caused segmentation violations in regexp commands under some conditions. 121. 6/22/92 Changed implementation of "glob" command to eliminate trailing slashes on directory names: they confuse some systems. There shouldn't be any user-visible changes in functionality except for names in error messages not having trailing slashes. 122. 7/2/92 Fixed bug that caused 'string match ** ""' to return 0. 123. 7/2/92 Fixed bug in Tcl_CreateCmdBuf where it wasn't initializing the buffer to an empty string. 124. 7/6/92 Fixed bug in "case" command where it used NULL pattern string after errors in the "default" clause. 125. 7/25/92 Speeded up auto_load procedure: don't reread all the index files unless the path has changed. 126. 8/3/92 Changed tclUnix.h to define MAXPATHLEN from PATH_MAX, not _POSIX_PATH_MAX. ----------------- Released version 6.4, 8/7/92 ------------------