Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL!

QOTW: "My copy of 'Practical Programming in Tcl and Tk' just came
today in the mail.  Whoo hoooo! Now I am dangerous!"
     -- Bob

"And for dire emergencies the pages are much thinner in the 4th 
edition."
     -- Glenn Halstead


POTW: Wcb 3.0, Mentry 2.8, and Tablelist 3.5 by Csaba Nemethi.
New versions of widget callback, multi-entry widget, and multi-
column listbox, that tried-and-true triad of trusty Tcl tools:
     http://www.nemethi.de


     Wolf Grossi shares an [expr] puzzle, and the merit of always
     bracing [expr] arguments is further discussed:
         http://groups.google.com/groups?th=82003f0e92859401

     Discarding input that contains too many nonprintable chars:
         http://groups.google.com/groups?th=f9d81ce58746efb4

     If [info complete] gives counter-intuitive results, just remember
     that it's checking syntax, not semantics:
         http://groups.google.com/groups?th=40cee9a3f4155961

     Did you know that [exec] has the side effect of reaping
     <defunct> child processes?  Bruce Hartweg did:
         http://groups.google.com/groups?th=7b3f8328f62e5b9

     Using channels (and event handlers) to read data from a variable:
         http://groups.google.com/groups?th=b058e8b7c6ae3ee8

     [array values] seems obviously useful, but who'd have thunk
     there were so many details to get right?
         http://groups.google.com/groups?th=d38e4771b67bccb2
         http://groups.google.com/groups?th=436a767ca963a546
         http://www.tcl.tk/cgi-bin/tct/tip/200

Thanks to Arjen Markus for his summary of Wiki activity:
  For those of you who have not noticed: the Wiki front page has changed
  - has changed a lot! Have a look at: <http://wiki.tcl.tk> (yes, without
  any number) to see why so many enthousiastic postings have appeared.
  
  In the wake of the front page a lot of other pages were corrected, 
  updated, created and rewritten. So, please, if your humble chronicler
  has missed a bunch of interesting pages and hence does not mention
  them in this weekly summary, forgive him! 
  
  Tcl: history, philosophy and technology
  - Here is a chronology of Tcl's development since its birth in 1988
    - <http://wiki.tcl.tk/1721>
  
  - Ever thought of a proper coding style for Tk? Well, here are some
    rules with comments - <http://wiki.tcl.tk/11290>
  
  - "Actions" are a nice abstraction for some of the rules that 
    are mentioned. See <http://wiki.tcl.tk/11505> for more information.
  
  - For UNIX-style OSes: Setting the effective user-ID is tricky
    - <http://wiki.tcl.tk/2654>
  
  - But so is the use of "wm geometry" - <http://wiki.tcl.tk/11502>
  
  - Running a script without storing it in a file first. Surely
    it can be done more easily? <http://wiki.tcl.tk/906>
  
  Tcl: the human side 
  - Humans like text to be justified properly, don't they?
    <http://wiki.tcl.tk/1774> has the answer: how to do that in Tcl?
  
  - Hyphenation helps to get nicely laid-out text. How difficult
    would it be to properly hyphenate, say, Finnish text? 
    <http://wiki.tcl.tk/11493> witnesses that it is tougher than
    you think.
  
  - Besides working with text, a programmer, human as he or she is,
    struggles with the best way to model the data his/her program
    has to handle. To draw a diagram or not to draw a diagram
    - <http://wiki.tcl.tk/11494>
  
  - And of course, infix operators are more "natural" to us than
    prefix operators. The final answer? Probably not, but it
    is a nice experiment anyway - <http://wiki.tcl.tk/11492>
  
  Tcl: purely technical
  - GASP lets you encode and decode data protocols via Tcl
    - <http://wiki.tcl.tk/6687>
  
  - If you need to transfer data to/from a PDA, maybe this client/server
    implementation of the underlying protocol is of interest to you
    - <http://wiki.tcl.tk/11520>
  
  And now something completely different
  - Is it a game? Is it a demo? It is undescribable, that is for sure.
    Run the code from <http://wiki.tcl.tk/11503> and be flabbergasted!


Everything Tcl-related you want is probably one or two clicks away in these
pages:
    The "Welcome to comp.lang.tcl" message by Andreas Kupries
        http://www.purl.org/net/tcl-welcome

    The Tcl Developer Site is Tcl's "home base".
	http://www.tcl.tk

    The Eleventh Mostly-Annual Tcl Conference will be this October.
	http://www.tcl.tk/community/tcl2004/

    Larry Virden maintains a comp.lang.tcl FAQ launcher
        http://www.purl.org/NET/Tcl-FAQ/

    The Tcl Developer Xchange is a highly organized resource center
    of documents and software with provisions for individuals to
    maintain references to their own software:
        http://www.tcl.tk/resource/
    The TDX sponsor, ActiveState, also keeps info to convince your
    boss Tcl is a good thing
        http://www.tcl.tk/scripting/

    The Tcl'ers Wiki is a huge, dynamic, collaboratively edited repository
    of documentation, examples, tutorials and pontifications on all things 
    Tcl.
        http://wiki.tcl.tk/0
    For the ideal overview of the topics about Tcl most likely to
    interest a newcomer, see "Arts and Crafts ..."
        http://wiki.tcl.tk/969

    ActiveState maintains binaries distribution and development tools
        http://www.activestate.com/Tcl
    along with a Cookbook of Tcl recipes
        http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Tcl

    Cameron Laird tracks several Tcl/Tk references of interest
        http://phaseit.net/claird/comp.lang.tcl/

    Cetus Links maintains a Tcl/Tk page with verified links
        http://www.cetus-links.org/oo_tcl_tk.html

    Google Groups archives comp.lang.tcl.announce posts
        http://groups.yahoo.com/group/tcl_announce/

Previous - (U)se the (R)esource, (L)uke! - messages are listed here:
  http://www.ddj.com/topics/tclurl/
An alternative is
  http://groups.google.com/groups?oi=djq&as_q=+Tcl-URL&as_ugroup=comp.lang.tcl

Suggestions/corrections for next week's posting are always welcome.

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