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[/] [or1k/] [trunk/] [insight/] [expect/] [CHANGES.2to3] - Rev 1765

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If you used to use Expect version 2 (any version written before
September '91) you will find that the current version of Expect (3)
introduced minor but significant incompatibilities.

The HISTORY file describes these briefly.  They are described at
length in the man page.

I'm sorry if you feel annoyed at the incompatibilities, but Expect has
been out for a year and a half, Tcl even longer.  Both Tcl and Expect
are using this as a last chance to make significant changes, so that
we will not disturb even more users in the future.

There is no automated conversion procedure (although see note below)
for Expect or even raw Tcl.  For now, I suggest that you not bother
fixing things that already work - just keep the old Expect around.
The binary isn't very big after all.  If you do write a translation
script, let me know.  Thanks.

Of course, I felt obligated to convert the examples distributed with
expect.  I did this by hand while writing the new version itself,
partly as an aid but mostly to test lots of variations.  In 90% of the
scripts, all I had to do was change:

(changes due to Tcl)
        'index' to 'lindex'
        'range' to 'lrange'
        'length' to 'llength'
        'print' to 'send_user' or 'puts' depending on how you use it
        'function .... c' with '[join [function [split string ""]] ""]'
(changes due to Expect)
        'expect_match' to 'expect_out(buffer)'
        'set match_max' to 'match_max' (perhaps with -d flag)
        '*' to '-re .+'

If anyone wants to write a script to do this, note the pitfalls:

1) functions and variables do not share the same namespace, so it is a
inappropriate to just globally rename things.

A number of optimizations can be made:

1) If you are doing multiple split/joins, you should probably cache the
split string.

2) Virtually all uses of scan are unnecessary now, due to exec's automatic
stripping of terminating newlines, and expect's support of regexps.

3) String manipulation can be reduced or avoided entirely if you use
expect -re.

4) exec is no longer necessary to retrieve environment variables, since
they can now be retrieved from $env.

5) If you have been really anal about testing for timeout and eof, you
can dramatically reduce the size of your scripts by using expect_before
and expect_after.  This is more efficient, as well, since those actions
are only parsed once.

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