Tcl/Tk 8.5a4 released

Tcl/Tk 8.5a4 Release Announcement
April 27, 2006

The Tcl Core Team is pleased to announce the 8.5a4 releases of the Tcl
dynamic language and the Tk toolkit. This is the fourth alpha release
of Tcl/Tk 8.5. More details can be found below. We would like to
express our gratitude to all those who submit bug reports and patches.
This information is invaluable in enabling us to identify and eliminate
problems in the core.

Where to get the new releases:
------------------------------

Tcl/Tk 8.5a4 sources are freely available as open source from the
Tcl Developer Xchange web site at:

http://www.tcl.tk/software/tcltk/8.5.html

This web page also contains additional information about the releases,
including new features and notes about installing and compiling the
releases. Sources are always available from the Tcl SourceForge
project's file distribution area:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=10894

For additional information:
---------------------------

Please visit the Tcl Developer Xchange web site:

http://www.tcl.tk/

This site contains a variety of information about Tcl/Tk in general, the
core Tcl and Tk distributions, Tcl development tools, and much more.

Thank you for your contributions:
---------------------------------

As usual, this release includes contributions from the Tcl community.
We have a page honoring these contributors at:

http://www.tcl.tk/software/tcltk/contributors.html

Summary of Changes since Tcl/Tk 8.5a3:
--------------------------------------

The following were the main changes in Tcl/Tk 8.5a3. A complete list
can be found in the changes file at the root of the source tree. The
more complete ChangeLog is also included with each source release.

This release is the fourth alpha release of 8.5. The alpha moniker means
that it is in feature addition mode. All relevant bugs fixes (and some
more) up to and including 8.4.13 changes are included in 8.5a4. The
following list focuses on new features added so far in 8.5. This release
is a development release, and should only be considered for deployment
use after considerable testing.

* [TIP 181] Added [namespace unknown] subcommand.

* [TIP 194] Added [apply] command.

* [TIP 208] Added [chan] command.

* [TIP 215] Made [incr] auto-initialize.

* [TIP 219] Added [chan create] subcommand (reflected channels).

* [TIP 231] Added [wm attributes] support on X11.

* [TIP 237] Unlimited range for integer calculations.
***POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY***
For scripts that rely on implicit overflow truncation in integer calculations.

* [TIP 250] Added [namespace upvar] subcommand.

* [TIP 254] Support additional types for Tcl_LinkVar.

* [TIP 255] New [expr] functions min() and max().

* [TIP 256] New [$text configure] option: -tabstyle.

* [TIP 258] Added [encoding dirs] subcommand.

* [TIP 260] New canvas text item option: -underline.

* Support for Mac OSX universal binaries.

* Support [glob] on the Hierarchical File System (HFS).

* Support Apple Type Services for Unicode Imaging (ATSUI).

* (Re-)define [:print:] to cover sensible Unicode character classes.

* Tk's default [bgerror] dialog truncate messages at 45 chars.

* [glob -nocomplain] now silences only "empty result" errors.

* ::tcl_precision value is now kept per-thread, not per-process.

* Dropped support for IRIX 4, RISCos, Ultrix, and ancient BSD.

* Dropped support for pre-ANSI C compilers (_ANSI_ARGS_).

* Dropped support for pre-msys_mingw7.zip msys builds.

* Deprecated TCL_VARARGS*; availability of stdarg.h now assumed.

* Configure script development now requires autoconf-2.59.

* Improved [clock] performance over prior 8.5a releases.

* Restored registration of "procbody", "list", and "boolean" Tcl_ObjTypes.

* Revised bytecode of [switch] (incompatible with prior 8.5a bytecode).

* Restored ability to set write traces on ::errorInfo.

* Updated clock tzdata to Olson's tzdata2005r.

* Updated LibTomMath to release 0.37.

--

Tcl Core Team and Maintainers
Don Porter, Tcl Core Release Manager

--
| Don Porter Mathematical and Computational Sciences Division |
| donald.porter@xxxxxxxx Information Technology Laboratory |
| http://math.nist.gov/~DPorter/ NIST |
|______________________________________________________________________|
.

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