Changes from B3 to final release of Tcl7.5 and Tk4.1

This summarizes the changes from the b3 releases of Tcl 7.5 and Tk 4.1 to the final ones. Most of the changes were bug fixes, but there were the a few new or modified features. For complete details, of course, see the "changes" files with the distributions.

  1. Network names for files have been removed (they didn't work very well). Instead, local names get used everywhere, except on Macs, where you can use UNIX-like file names such as a/b/c as well as Mac-style file names. New commands "file split", "file join", and "file pathtype" make it possible to manipulate file names in a platform-independent fashion. See the "file" and "filename" manual pages for details.
  2. In "auto" translation mode, different end-of-line sequences can now be intermingled in a single file (one line can be terminated by CR, the next by CRLF, the next by LF). There is a new -eofchar option, which provides support for the control-Z end-of-file character in Windows.
  3. The procedure Tcl_GetOpenFile has been restored (it was removed in Tcl 7.5b3). It can be used only under UNIX, and may not work well if you're doing I/O both from Tcl and from C: the buffers may get confused. However, if you just want to open a file from Tcl then do I/O from C, this will work fine.
  4. There are new -peername and -sockname fconfigure options for sockets, and there is an -async option to the "socket" command. The default is now for client sockets to be opened synchronously; use -async if you want an asynchronous open.
  5. The Tcl_OpenTcpClient procedure now takes an additional argument for specifying whether the connection should be opened synchronously.
  6. The Tcl and Tk startup scripts have been modified to search in a number of places for their library directories. This should allow them to find their libraries in all the common cases, even if you haven't set the TCL_LIBRARY and TK_LIBRARY environment variables.
  7. The names of the Tcl and Tk libraries now vary from platform to platform. The preferred names have a version number with a dot in it, as in libtcl7.5.so and -ltcl7.5. However, some platforms (such as SunOS and FreeBSD) don't allow the dots in version numbers. On these platforms, names like libtcl75.so and -ltcl75 are used.
  8. There is a new procedure Tcl_InterpDeleted for finding out whether an interpreter is in the process of being deleted.