From: Brent.Welch@nntp1.ba.best.com
Subject: Tcl/Tk 8.1 Release Announcement
Date: 30 Apr 1999 13:44:29 -0700

This message is to announce the 8.1 release of the Tcl scripting language
and the Tk toolkit.  This release is a major milestone for Tcl, and it
could not have been done without significant help from the Tcl community.
A separate posting will thank those contributors.

There are three key new features in 8.1 that establish Tcl as the leader
among scripting languages, making it the industry's first scripting
solution capable of handling enterprise-scale application integration
tasks.  No other cross-platform scripting language has all of these key
features:

* Full Unicode support and a message catalog for internationalization.
* Thread-safety for Tcl and Tk.
* A new regular expression package by Henry Spencer that adds many
  advanced features: non-greedy quantifiers, bounds, positive
  and negative lookahead, collating elements, equivalence classes,
  several built-in character classes, and comments.  In addition,
  the regular expression engine works on Unicode strings to make
  this the best regular expression package available anywhere.

Where to get the new releases:
------------------------------

Tcl 8.1 and Tk 8.1 are freely available in open source from the
Scriptics Web site at
	http://www.scriptics.com/software/8.1.html
This Web page also contains additional information about the releases,
including new features and notes about installing and compiling the
releases.

For additional information:
---------------------------

Please visit the Scriptics Web site.
    http://www.scriptics.com
This site contains a variety of information about Tcl/Tk in general, the
core Tcl and Tk distributions, the TclPro tool suite, and much more.

A new Tcl 8.1 version of TclPro, the professional development tool suite
and extended Tcl platform, will be available soon.

Bugs fixed since the 8.1b3 release:
-----------------------------------

There were only a few critical changes made since the last beta:

* Fixed a deadlock in the notifier that had caused focus.test to hang.

*  Fixed bug where socket -async combined with fileevent for writing
did not work under Windows NT.

* Restored the double byte definition of GB2312 and added the EUC-CN
encoding.  EUC-CN is a variant of GB2312 that shifts the characters
into bytes with the high bit set and includes ASCII as a subset.

* Added 'extern "C" {}' block around the stub table pointer declaration
so the stub library can be used from C++.

* Set the -translation and -encoding options to binary for image files. 

* Fixed a memory leak in "info complete" with long, incomplete commands.

--	Brent Welch	<welch@scriptics.com>
	http://www.scriptics.com
	Scriptics: The Tcl Platform Company

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