Purpose: a discussion of some of the information you should be prepared
to provide when asking someone for help.

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LV:

   * My first suggestion is to take several deep breaths, as it sounds like you are about to hypervenilate.

   * Be prepared to show what your current code looks like.
   * As specifically as possible, tell what it is that the shown code should do. If your code is very long, feel free to visit the wiki's graphitti or new page page and start a new wiki page and just glue your code in there and then give a url.  Or, if you have your own web page, just give a url to that.
   * tell what kind of computer and operating system you are using, along with what version of tcl/expect ...

These steps will help you in that focusing on positive actions should
slow down your heart rate and regulate your breathing... and for us
it provides us a common background from which to try to help you.

Cameron:
On communicating code fragments and the limitations of this medium: the constraint is a good thing. Working to reduce your situation to a textual description augmented by at most a couple of lines of code is sure to benefit everyone concerned.

LV: Good point - I really hammer my users on this point. Handing me a foreign piece of code thousands of lines and procs long is guaranteed to cause me to try to hand it back ... On the other hand, showing me a small piece of code - hopefully stand alone so that I can try it on my machine without having to load and build a thousand pieces - results in me being able to 'tinker'.



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See also [The comp.lang.tcl newsgroup].