Tcl/Tk 8.6a2 RELEASED

Tcl/Tk 8.6a2 Release Announcement
August 25, 2008

The Tcl Core Team is pleased to announce the 8.6a2 releases of the Tcl
dynamic language and the Tk toolkit. This is the second alpha release
of Tcl/Tk 8.6. 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 8.6a2 sources are freely available as open source from the
Tcl Developer Xchange web site at:

http://www.tcl.tk/software/tcltk/8.6.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/showf...group_id=10894

Binaries for most major platforms are available from:

http://www.activestate.com/Tcl

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.

Summary of Changes since Tcl/Tk 8.6a1:
--------------------------------------

The following were the main changes in Tcl/Tk 8.6a2. 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 second alpha release of 8.6. The alpha moniker means
that it is in feature addition mode. All bug fixes (and some more) up
to and including 8.5.4 changes are included in 8.6a2. The following
list focuses on new features added so far in 8.6. This release is a
development release, and should only be considered for deployment use
after considerable testing.

* [TIP 304] New command [chan pipe].

* New Non-Recursive Evaluation implementation decouples
the Tcl evaluation stack from the C evaluation stack.

* New experimental commands in ::tcl::unsupported :
[tailcall], [atProcExit], [coroutine] and [yield].

* Stack overflow protection in regexp engine.

* Tcl_Finalize() no longer implicitly called on
DLL_PROCESS_DETACH.

* Stopped providing workarounds for broken Itcl use of
[namespace code]. Use recent enough Itcl releases that
take care of themselves.
*** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY ***

* Revised public Tcl routines passing (Tcl_ObjType *),
(Tcl_Timer *), and (Tcl_Filesystem *) arguments to
use "const" to indicate read-only pointers.
*** POTENTIAL INCOMPATIBILITY ***

* Fixed broken handling of ***= regexps.

* Fixed crash in [namespace inscope {}].

* [namespace import]ed command now fire execution traces.

* More consistent "wrong # args" messages.

* Revised number formatting in Tk scroll interface so
that values no longer look like integers.

--
Tcl Core Team and Maintainers
Don Porter, Tcl Core Release Manager
--
| Don Porter Mathematical and Computational Sciences Division |
| donald.porter@nist.gov Information Technology Laboratory |
| http://math.nist.gov/~DPorter/ NIST |
|_________________________________________________ _____________________|