DN482910549

Subject: Re: TCL/TK file extension (was Newbie Question: This May Sound Dumb...) - DN [1]

Bryan Oakley <oakley@channelpoint.com> - 27 May 1999 - comp.lang.tcl

 Darren New wrote:
 >
 > Aldric_Lhernault wrote:
 > > Why not .tcl (tclsh) and .tk (wish) ?
 > > AFAIC, that would be less confusing.
 >
 > Mainly because that would be incompatible with what's out there now. But
 > yes, it would be better other than that.

 Of course, if tk could be loaded dynamically, painlessly, and without
 any extra configuration by the user, one could stick with .tcl, and for
 programs that must use tk one would include "package require tk" as the
 first line of the script. Double click on a .tcl file, tclsh starts up,
 sees it must load tk, loads it up, and FOOM! life is good.

 To me, that's the way it should be. Let the script tell the tcl shell
 what packages it requires, and the shell should attempt to honor that.
 What would really be cool is, if the requested package doesn't exist one
 would get a dialog saying "This program requires package foo, which
 isn't installed on your system. Do you want to retrieve that package
 from the internet?". The pieces exist to be able to do that, but there
 would have to be some sort of infrastructure in place for a script to
 know where to get the package from.

 --
 Bryan Oakley            mailto:oakley@channelpoint.com
 ChannelPoint, Inc.        http://purl.oclc.org/net/oakley