Notes from Tcl/Tk 1997, Boston

Tuesday Sessions

Tcl in AltaVista Forum, a web-based collaborative environment. Extensive use of multiple interpreters within a persistent process, ``recreating the process-per-command environment''.

Caubweb, disconnected web cache including delayed writeback. Pre-8.0 Tcl lacks the modularity tools that have made Perl's contributed libraries so strong.

Jacl, Tcl in Java. The only big difference between C and Java extensions is error handling. There's a fundamental problem with losing a Java object reference when it turns into a Tcl string; ``\|`solution': don't muck with the variable that contains a Java object reference''. ``A very small subset of Tk... basically `button'!'' ``I'm not sure how much compatibility we can provide, although we can promise a lot.'' He's now working for Ousterhout.

Tcl-DP rewrite. Q: ``Is all this well-documented now?'' A: ``Send me a grad student.''

Don Libes on Expect (conference best-paper award). ``My support work has come out of my own time. I haven't forgotten this because my wife won't let me.'' Expect's configure file is bigger than Tcl.

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