Chapter 51. TclTk 8.0

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	Practical Programming in Tcl & Tk, Third Edition By Brent B. Welch
	Table of Contents
	Part VII.  Changes

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Chapter 51. Tcl/Tk 8.0

Tcl 8.0 includes an on-the-fly byte code compiler that improves performance of scripts from 2 to 20 times depending on what commands they use. The Tk version number was set to match Tcl. Tk 8.0 uses native buttons, menus, menubars, and scrollbars. Font objects allow flexible font handling in a platform-independent way.

Tcl 8.0 added a byte-code compiler that improves performance dramatically. The compiler is transparent to Tcl scripts so you do not have to do anything special to take advantage of it. The other main addition to Tcl is support of binary data. It is now safe to read binary data into Tcl variables, and new commands convert between strings and binary representations.

Tk 8.0 has native look and feel on UNIX, Windows, and Macintosh. This is due to native buttons, native menus, native scrollbars, and a new cross-platform menu bar facility. A new cross-platform font facility improves the font support. Tk also has support for application embedding, which is used in the Web browser plug-in described in Chapter 20.

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