How To Guides

The following "How To" guides provide task-oriented documentation for Tcl/Tk and the TclPro tools. We have created these in response to customer queries and hope they will be useful to you. We appreciate your feedback, so do not hesitate to contact AskJeff@activestate.com if your problem is not covered here or in the Frequently Asked Questions page, or if the existing "How To" documents need improvement.

Tcl/Tk

New Regular Expression Features in Tcl 8.1: Tcl 8.1 now handles advanced regular expressions. This document gives an overview of the many new features and notes the few areas where existing scripts may need to be modified.
How To Use Tcl 8.1 Internationalization Features: Tcl 8.1 introduced many powerful features for creating internationalized applications. This document provides an overview of the new Tcl 8.1 internationalization facilities, provides tips for creating and distributing internationalized applications, and points out issues to be aware of when updating older applications to Tcl 8.1.
How To Compile Tcl: Compiling the Tcl sources can be a breeze, if you know what to do! This document explains how to compile Tcl/Tk from the sources on Unix, Windows, and Macintosh.
How to Compile Tcl on Windows: This explains how to configure the Cygwin envrionment to support that standard (TEA) model for building Tcl software on Windows.
How to Compile Extensions for Windows: With Windows compilers you have to worry about how symbols get exported from DLLs. This page describes the compiler macros you need to use to have your symbols properly exported.
How To Use Stub Libraries: This document explains how to build extensions that take advantage of the stub libraries present in Tcl 8.1. The stubs library makes it possible to create extensions that work with different Tcl versions without recompiling. Once you compile against the stubs library, you should be able to use the extension with new Tcl releases.
How To Use Tcl and Threads: This brief document describes the model Tcl uses for threads, which is that one thread can have one or more interpreters, but each interpreter is bound to a particular thread. You cannot have more than one thread share a Tcl interpreter. Communication among interpreters is done by posting scripts to their event queue.

TclPro

How To Wrap: TclPro Wrapper is a power tool that can be tricky to use. This document covers a dozen scenarios that range from wrapping a single script with a standard shell, to creating a custom shell that includes third party extensions.

More How To Guides

Tcl users have compiled their own (Local copy) How To Guides about a variety of topics. If you've put together a useful "how to" page, please contact us.

Last modified: April 24, 2001