[TCLCORE] Re: Notes about Perl6 ideas - good to read

[Jeffrey H. <jef...@aj...>]

I should note that it's not just Perl6, but the next major rev of Python
that has clearly announced that it will sacrifice some aspect of backwards
compatability (although they aren't as far along in public planning yet).

Is it major pain when just a translation script is needed?  I think that
Tcl is already a better language in that we could likely provide a Tcl
level compatability mode that's like the translation on the fly.  Thus
the request for 'package require Tcl 8' in Tcl9 would shift around the
necessary bits to make it look like Tcl8.  The user wouldn't gain whatever
advantages Tcl9 has, but things would still work.  I think we could
achieve that with 99% compatability at the Tcl level.

Tcl at the C level would be trickier, as we'd want to reconsider some of
the designs of basic public structures (like Tcl_Obj, and finally getting
the Var structures public).  Sure, Tcl is great as it is, but for a lot
of people its only great when they have itcl, blt, tix, patches for better
C++ compatibility, more data structures, etc etc.  Fewer and fewer are
truly satisfied with what the "core" provides.

Jeffrey Hobbs                     Tcl Ambassador
ho...@Aj...          Ajuba Solutions (née Scriptics)

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Brent Welch [mailto:we...@aj...]
	...
> I'm probably and old man here, but I think we can revitalize Tcl without
> breaking backwards compatibility.  In fact, enough incompatibility could
> really hurt us.  We've finally got a stable C API through stubs - it seems
> a shame to make gratuitous changes to "clean things up".
>
> Now, I'm all for things like Feather and factoring the core so it can
> be smaller, but if someone doesn't want a "Tcl-lite" that just eliminates
> some features, then they should be able to use Tcl 9 without major pain.
> I'd probably also live with a binary-incompatibilty but source-compatibilty
> approach, which is probably necessary if we muck with the Tcl_Obj and
> Tcl_ObjType structures.

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