Download Tcl/Tk 8.5 beta 3

The Tcl Core Team has released a new beta version of the Tcl/Tk package which consists of the Tcl scripting language and its toolkit. Tcl is a powerful scripting language with a simple structure and support for different platforms. Tk is a graphical toolkit for this scripting language and allows you to develop graphical applications. The version number has since arrived at 8.5b3 and is distributed as source code as usual. The announcement of this beta version looks like this:

Tcl/Tk 8.5b3 Release Announcement:

The Tcl Core Team is pleased to announce the 8.5b3 releases of the Tcl dynamic language and the Tk toolkit. This is the third beta 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.

Summary of Changes since Tcl/Tk 8.5b2:

The following were the main changes in Tcl/Tk 8.5b3. 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 is a beta release of 8.5. The beta designation means that the feature set for 8.5 is believed to be complete, and the focus is now on testing and bug fixing moving quickly toward an 8.5.0 release. All relevant bug fixes (and some more) up to and including 8.4.16 changes are included in 8.5b3. This release is a development release, and should only be considered for deployment use after considerable testing.

• New Tk look and default fonts on X11. [tk::classic::restore] to undo.
• New configure option: –disable-rpath.
• Continued Tk demo enhancement and documentation improvement.
• Fixed broken compile on x86_64.
• Fixed crash and infinite loop in regexp engine.
• Fixed [tk_getOpenFile] crash on Mac OS X Leopard.
• Font adjust interface for [console].
• Arabic and Hebrew rendering on Windows.
• Corrected locale for sv.msg message catalog.
• Performance improvements for binary [gets]binary [string match]ing, [info exists]stack overflow checking, list indexing, interpreter state reset, and simple regular expressions.
• Embed iso8859-1 encoding directly into libtcl.

Summary of Changes since Tcl/Tk 8.5b1:

• [TIP 242] New [tk_getOpenFile] option: -type variable.
• [TIP 125] Dockable frame support.
• [TIP 145] Font enhancement support added for Aqua.
• Enhanced Tk demo suite.
• Improvements to [ttk::combobox] and [ttk::notebook].
• New Hungarian message catalog for Tk.
• Fixed an intermittent crash in thread support.
• Fixed possible crash in [place] geometry manager.
• Fixed auto-loading of [::tcl::tm::path].
• Fixed [string is integer -failindex (0o… or 0b…)].
• Support for 64-bit X11 on Mac OS X systems.

Summary of Changes since Tcl/Tk 8.5a6:

• Removed support for {expand} syntax
  *** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY with 8.5 alphas only ***
• [TIP 145] Enhanced font handling.
• Tcl variable memory efficiency improved.
  *** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY for users of internal structs ***
• Leave traces created during traced command execution do not fire.
  *** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY ***
• Restored 8.4 compatibility of [package require -exact]
  *** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY with 8.5 alphas only ***
• Revised parser expands {*} literals instead of returning a TCL_TOKEN_EXPAND_WORD token
  *** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY with 8.5 alphas only ***
• Tcl_GetObjType(“nsName”) no longer supported.
  *** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY ***
• Fixed crash in nested [dict update].
  *** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY with bytecode from 8.5 alphas ***
• Fixed panic in [text] DLine layout.
• Fixed crash in ::errorInfo traces.
• Fixed crash in [grid *configure].
• Improved Aqua ttk::combo box appearance.
• Fixed interactive tclsh failure to prompt for continuation line when entered line ends with backslash-newline.
• make [interp limit -command] able to stop [while 1 {}].
• Fixed open mode “a+”.
• [info] is a [namespace ensemble].
• Set tcl_platform(user) from system, not environment.
• [clock] tzdata updated to Olson’s tzdata2007g.

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