Changes in executing Tcl 8.4

[Charlie Bursell]

Cloverleaf 5.4.1 and above now use Tcl 8.4.  While we gained a lot of new functionality with the new Tcl, unfortunately we also lost some.  However, the plus still out weigh the negatives by far.

One change is the flags that used to be associated with an invocation of tcl or hcitcl – For those of you that don’t know there is no difference between tcl and hcitcl.

The flags seem to come from Extended Tcl  (TclX).  Prior the Tcl 8.4 upgrade, tclx served as the interpreter behind tcl and hcitcl.  After the upgrade, TclX only has the extended library package, so tclsh served as the interpreter for tcl and hcitcl.  Attached is the README file from TclX 8.4.  It says, TclX 8.4 differs from its predecessors in that it is based more on the idea of TclX as an extension to Tcl, and not an alternate environment. There is no TkX and no stand-alone shells are built.

Therefore the change to all of your stand-alone scripts should be to remove any flags you are now passing to tcl or hcitcl.  If you have a flag it will take you to an interactive tclsh session; not what you want from a script.

To pass a file to tcl or hcitcl simply provide the file name with no flags; e.g., hcitcl myfile.   I don’t know of a work-around yet for the -c flag which allowed for a command to be executed with the call.

Here is the man page for tclsh.  An invocation of tcl or hcitcl now calls the tclsh interpreter.

http://www.tcl.tk/man/tcl8.4/UserCmd/tclsh.htm

Sorry for any inconveniences with scripts.  We will add something about this to the Release Notes.

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