The Simple Library
A library of commands and utilities for Tcl development
The Simple Library is a collection
of commands and utilities aimed towards assisting software development in Tcl, the great language
designed by John
Ousterhout (follow this
link for a list of Tcl resources). It provides elements I consider
essential for good software engineering and/or medium to big projects
development, such as a framework for regression testing, documentation almost
rensembling literate programming, centralized error handling and improved
package handling as well as debugging aids such as a mechanism to ensure type
consistency for command arguments and non-local variables which provides some
of the benefits of strong typing.
The Simple Library is written in pure Tcl itself, so that no compilation is
needed to run it on Unix, Windows or Mac environments. Just unpack into one
of the directories that Tcl searches for packages and you are done; Tcl
version 8.0 or later is required (I have tested Tcl versions 8.0.4, 8.2.1 and
8.3b1, both in Unix and Windows).
In the future, some sections are likely to be rewritten in C for
improved performance.
The Simple Library is distributed under the Tcl
license, which in turn is similar to the BSD license. In essence, this
license allows you to do whatever you want with the software provided the
copyright notices are left untouched.
To test the installation, type simpletest -all
in Unix or
tclsh?? simpletest -all
in Windows (??
is
your Tcl version, such as 80
); a total of 551
test cases in 9 packages shall execute and pass.
The Simple Library is structured as a set of packages, providing a
differentiated functionality each. The following documentation for The Simple
Library packages has been extracted verbatim from the corresponding Tcl file.
Documentation in HTML format will be provided soon.
-
simpletest: Simple Library regression testing tool.
The current version is 0.2, dated 23 april 2000. This is the first public
release, meaning that the spectrum of functionality is limited and that no
separate documentation is provided (that is, the documentation is embedded
into the code). Apart from that, the library is well beyond beta quality.
Expect minor API changes in future versions, though.
Download The Simple Library as
Last update: 23 april 2000