aspect

You can find me on the chat quite often. I'm addicted to Tcl.

I have a bunch of code that is either useful or interesting or just plain weird in tcl-hacks at ChiselApp.

Not many contributions to the wiki yet, but here are some I think are especially neat.

and a few things I've put here for lack of a better home:

.. other random ranty stuff:

Soon, some of my essential code will appear on https://chiselapp.com/user/aspect/ .


On Wiki

Syntax summary?

I keep screwing up wiki syntax. This bold link to Formatting Rules is here to remind me (thanks RLE for the tip). Things I often forget:

  • Lists: three spaces before. For all sorts of lists.
  • Definition lists: Exactly three spaces after the colon.
  • Named links: target %|% title %|%. Same in []. Mnemonic: same order as <a href=__>__</a>
  • Categories: <<categories>> This | That | The Other
  • Verbatim: Double markers to make 'em literal. [puts [info nameofexe]]] Don't try to get to fancy, it will only hurt.

Content deletion

There's a lot of old discussion in here that hasn't been relevant since last century. While preserving it for folks stuck on old versions and archaeology is desirable, wiki usability would be dramatically improved by a lot of this content disappearing, or moving to somewhere less distracting to readers and editors. I often get stuck, trying to contribute to a page in poor state and at the same time make its navigability better (or at least not worse!). Can the gnomes offer any hints or policy?

PYK 2015-01-26: Lately I've found myself making links to previous versions of the page when I've decided to delete some old content but still leave a breadcrumb to it for anyone who might be interested. A single page can take horurs or days to reorganize, but when there isn't time for that, even the smalled incremental cleanup is a step in the right direction.

aspect 2015-02-02: Thanks, that's a good idea. I see you have done that on split, where it worked well. I didn't yet work up the gumption to clean up that page though .. soon, I hope ;-).

Manpage Content in the Wiki

See for example send. Content above the discussion repeats the manual verbatim. This is a problem because changes to the manual don't make it into the wiki. Wiki content goes stale, people get misled, someone eventually has to change it by tediously copying text from the manual into wiki syntax. In the meantime, pointless content gets in the way of maintaining the good stuff.

IMHO all verbatim manual content in the wiki should be erased.

PYK 2015-01-26: I think that the wiki page for a command should comprehensively describe the command, but if the description truly is verbatim, there's no harm in deleting it and pointing to the official documentation. I'm more likely to update and wordsmith verbatim documentation rather than delete it.

aspect 2015-02-02: Thanks for the endorsement.

Manpage Links

A lot of manual links go to purl.org or to specific versions of Tcl. More robust links can be generated that look like:

    https://www.tcl-lang.org/man/tcl/TclCmd/Tcl.htm

I'm fixing them when I touch related pages, but a wiki macro would also help.

Automated / assisted gnoming

Is this a thing people do? Any tools to recommend? I can hardly live without It's All Text! in my firefox, but that's hardly ambitious.

Wikit improvements

There's been talk of migration to another engine, I'm not sure how that project is progressing. A lower-hanging fruit might be to improve the rendering here, making it more CSS/JS friendly so we can share bookmarklets and get somewhere incrementally. Coordination with CMcC and assistance from jdc would be needed initially ...


Random Blatherings

... this is where I will eventually elaborate my plans to promote Abstract Interpretation, Macrology and/or inline-able procedures to make Tcl more fun and performant.



Reference to comments on Generic Calculator Namespace Package Example


gold 12Dec2018. I am still learning TCL. The namespace command is considered an advanced feature of TCL, according to Brent Welch & other textbooks. I am running into lock up on versions past the existing namespace program (published code), possibly due to the globals. I cannot seem to get more variables under the "quilt" of the namespace. I am posting the working TCL code available, short of the catastrophic coding failures. I appreciate your advanced comments and offer of collaboration from the TCL-wiki. But the "collective you" should be aware that the TCL code here has reached the level of my (Fortran77) skill set, without substantial input from the "TCL pros". Thanks,gold