When izl came out, I stopped my work. Then the following
reasons have recently caused me to continue:
1. for the zoomer to survive we need as many development modes as possible.
2. I plan to provide tcl binaries as freeware.
3. tcl is a standard for which manuals exist (even on the geos-SDK disk)
and can be run or tested unchanged on a variety of platforms.
(to help support the tcl-z subset, I could provide tcl-z for dos and unix).
4. tcl is embeddable, and easily extendable (you write a c-program
with the few special funcs of your own design, make them
available to tcl with Tcl_CreateCommand, then link in the tcl-lib).
My main stumbling blocks have been the poor ansi support in geos.
geos is fine if you start in geos, but porting requires imaginative
grep'ing of their docs and include/*defs.
(examples of problems that surprised me are:
how to exit your program,
how to use a pointer to a function
.. easy in normal c, but well hidden in the geos SDK.)
My current problems have to do with the large string handling
that John D. Mitchell has discussed.
Maybe some of these things are fixed in the new version of the SDK,
but I haven't got it as they did not offer an upgrade deal (the
upgrade is $99, same as the purchase price).
Currently I have a buggy version of tcl-z, when I have removed
the more serious bugs, I will submit it.
If anyone else is working on a tcl port please contact me so that
we don't duplicate our efforts.
...
.:' `.
:.[o]o]
@ >
:}\_ ~/
{:
:} MalcomS@aol.com