1Announcing XOTcl 1.3.0
2**********************
3
4WHAT IS XOTCL?
5
6  XOTcl is an object-oriented extension of Tcl that was derived from
7  OTcl. In short, XOTcl tries to provide a highly flexible,
8  reflective, component-based, and object-oriented environment. It
9  integrates language support for high level concepts which are not
10  found in other languages, with reasonable performance. It prevails
11  the Tcl programming style and the dynamic/introspective nature of
12  the language, rather than introducing other language's styles and
13  rigidness (such as C++) into Tcl.
14
15
16Major changes relative to 1.2.0 are:
17
18  - Qualitative Improvements
19     * Improved portability: 
20       + TEA3 compatible build
21       + Much more polished configure+makefile (many thanks to 
22         Jim Lynch for his help)
23
24     * Improved code quality: 
25       + fixed 2 possible segmentation violations (error handling)
26       + fixed free memory reads (many thanks to Zoran Vasiljevic
27         for his help with purify)
28
29     * Less intrusive usage of XOTcl components:
30       + XOTcl procs and instprocs use now the namespace in which
31         they were defined. One can use XOTcl packages without having 
32         the need to import xotcl globally or to use the xotcl-prefix 
33         in all xotcl procs/instprocs.
34
35  - Functional Improvements 
36     * New forwarding mechanisms for fast delegation:
37       new methods 'forward' and 'instforward' (many thanks
38       to Bryan Schofield for fruitful discussions and suggestions).
39       This method is a superset of tclcmd/insttclcmd, which has
40       been marked as deprecated. See the tutorial for more details. 
41
42     * Nonpositional arguments for xotcl procs/instprocs; this is
43       a flexible way to check arguments, to provide defaults etc
44       for every xotcl proc/instproc. It uses a similar syntax as
45       ad_proc and ad_page_contract in OACS. See the tutorial for
46       more details.
47
48     * Extended methods filter, mixin, instfilter, instmixin as 
49       discussed in the XOTcl mailing list. These commands can be 
50       used more flexibly as follows
51
52             obj mixin               same as: obj info mixin
53             obj mixin {C1 C2}       same as: obj mixin set {C1 C2}
54             obj mixin set {C1 C2}   sets the mixins for obj
55             obj mixin get           same as: obj info mixin
56             obj mixin add C3        adds a mixin on front of the mixin list
57             obj mixin add C3 end    adds a mixin at the end the mixin list
58             obj mixin add C3 3      adds a mixin at the 3rd position
59             obj mixin delete ::C3   removes the mixin from the mixin list
60
61        The same semantics are available as well for filter, instmixin 
62        and instfilter. This change is fully backward compatible.
63        {filter,instfilter,mixin,instmixin}append are deprecated now.
64
65
66 For more details about the changes, please consult the ChangeLog and documentation.
67
68MORE INFO
69  General and more detailed information about XOTcl and its components
70  can be found at http://www.xotcl.org
71
72
73Best regards,
74
75Gustaf Neumann
76Uwe Zdun
77