[MACTCL] Re: Close to the source

[Philip A. <ph...@vc...>]

From: Jim Ingham <ji...@ap...>

> Tcl has never had readline or some other fancy command line handler 
> built in. There were patches floating around for a while to do this, 
> but it was felt that Tcl's use was more as a program runner, and less 
> as an interactive shell, so burdening it with all the machinery of 
> something like readline was counter to its real mission.

> If you can get Wish running, you can use the TkCon app to get a nice 
> interactive Tcl shell, however.

and later on:

> Perhaps a better solution for the non-Unix'y MacOS X folks is to 
> package up the full TkCon as a stand-alone app and suggest folks use 
> that. I would have no problem with shipping this in the binary 
> distribution of AquaTk.

> This is much nicer than just adding command-editing keys to the 
> Terminal version, it does on the fly syntax coloring, and has some 
> nice help facilities, etc...  We could also make it a real app (using 
> the AppMain.tcl trick), so folks can put it in their dock & launch it 
> from there.

Thanks Jim,

Are you talking 'bout what will come with an OS X install or a separate 
download?

What I'm after here is to be able to turn on folks to the best possible 
experience with the Tcl that come with a stock Mac OS X install (of the 
future).  I'm considering those folks on the AppleScript list I 
remarked on before--they might not be able to conveniently install 
anything else.

I don't know at this point how much the /System/Library/Tcl folder will 
be augmented when it is next upgraded and specifically whether or not 
it will include the Tk items. For Jaguar, Tcl appears to have a real 
skinny install compared to say Python. If it includes some of the 
packages and extras that have been mentioned but then won't be hooked 
up automatically, then I would expect the user to be able to say create 
a .tclshrc file and use 'source' and 'package require' et. al. to have 
their environment customized from the things in the stock install. This 
is the kind of thing that is currently expected for the default shell 
(as in /usr/share/tcsh/examples/README).


Cheers,


Philip Aker
http://www.aker.ca