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

[Mo D. <md...@cy...>]

On Fri, 28 Jul 2000, Jim Ingham wrote:

> I thought the aim was to get more stuff out of the core (making it thereby
> even LESS satisfactory by itself) and then making the process of acquiring &
> deploying extensions so easy that you would never hesitate to do so...  That
> is still our goal, right?

I hope that is still the goal. We do need to do some work to make
it easier to build and add new extensions, but I think we have the
right goal.

> As for introducing backwards incompatibilities, I agree with Brent a bit
> that we should not break Tcl compatibility unless there is some really
> compelling need.  I don't see any evils of the Tcl language that we are
> likely to cure in a good way (as opposed to, for instance, introducing some
> other comment syntax that breaks the current Tcl mold), that would require
> backwards incompatilibilities at the syntax level.  But in any case, this
> should be approached with some caution.

I don't think we need any syntax changes. I do think that a "no commands
must ever change" mentality will end up making things a lot harder
in the long run. Honestly, if you need to run some 10 year old code,
why can't you use an old version of Tcl? Why can't you do a bit of
porting to get it working with Tcl 9.0?

> It would, on the other hand, be nice to rearrange some of the commands to be
> a little more coherent.  It would be good to gather all the list commands
> together, and maybe even make the open & socket commands return objects, so
> we can get rid of this horrible mess of fconfigure, fblocked, eof...  But I
> don't think that any of the subsystems are so badly designed right now that
> we couldn't provide wrappers for the old syntax...

I would suggest that folks check out my EasySocket API, is it a
lot easier to use than the plain socket interface.

Mo DeJong
Red Hat Inc

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