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Fifth Annual Tcl/Tk Workshop, 1997
Redesigning Tcl-DP
Mike Perham, Brian C. Smith, Tibor Jánosi
Cornell University
Ioi Lam
Sun Microsystems
Abstract
Tcl-DP is a loadable module for Tcl that adds advanced
communication features to Tcl/Tk. Tcl-DP supports communication
by serial links, IP-multicast, TCP, UDP, and email, contains a
remote procedure call (RPC) mechanism, and supports the design of
new protocols using modules called filters. Tcl-DP 1.0 [Smi93]
was released four years ago and has since been used for numerous
commercial and academic projects. With age, however, the code
became so brittle that adding new features and porting to new
versions of Tcl was nearly impossible. Furthermore, many of
Tcl-DP's original features were incorporated in the Tcl
core, making them redundant in Tcl-DP. Hence, we decided to write
the latest version of Tcl-DP (version 4.0) from scratch. In this
paper, we describe the new features of Tcl-DP 4.0, its
architecture and implementation, and problems we encountered with
Tcl's new I/O system.
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