The Simple Library

A library of commands and utilities for Tcl development

What is?

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.

Packages

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.

Utilities

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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.

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Last update: 23 april 2000