Announcing XOTcl 1.3.0
**********************

WHAT IS XOTCL?

  XOTcl is an object-oriented extension of Tcl that was derived from
  OTcl. In short, XOTcl tries to provide a highly flexible,
  reflective, component-based, and object-oriented environment. It
  integrates language support for high-level concepts which are not
  found in other languages, with reasonable performance. It prevails
  the Tcl programming style and the dynamic/introspective nature of
  the language, rather than introducing other language's styles and
  rigidness (such as C++) into Tcl.


Major changes relative to 1.2.0 are:

  - Qualitative Improvements
     * Improved portability: 
       + TEA3 compatible build
       + Much more polished configure+makefile (many thanks to 
         Jim Lynch for his help)

     * Improved code quality: 
       + fixed 2 possible segmentation violations (error handling)
       + fixed free memory reads (many thanks to Zoran Vasiljevic
         for his help with purify)

     * Less intrusive usage of XOTcl components:
       + XOTcl procs and instprocs use now the namespace in which
         they were defined. One can use XOTcl packages without having 
         the need to import xotcl globally or to use the xotcl-prefix 
         in all xotcl procs/instprocs.

  - Functional Improvements 
     * New forwarding mechanisms for fast delegation:
       new methods 'forward' and 'instforward' (many thanks
       to Bryan Schofield for fruitful discussions and suggestions).
       This method is a superset of tclcmd/insttclcmd, which has
       been marked as deprecated. See the tutorial for more details. 

     * Nonpositional arguments for xotcl procs/instprocs; this is
       a flexible way to check arguments, to provide defaults etc
       for every xotcl proc/instproc. It uses a similar syntax as
       ad_proc and ad_page_contract in OACS. See the tutorial for
       more details.

     * Extended methods filter, mixin, instfilter, instmixin as 
       discussed in the XOTcl mailing list. These commands can be 
       used more flexibly as follows

             obj mixin               same as: obj info mixin
             obj mixin {C1 C2}       same as: obj mixin set {C1 C2}
             obj mixin set {C1 C2}   sets the mixins for obj
             obj mixin get           same as: obj info mixin
             obj mixin add C3        adds a mixin on front of the mixin list
             obj mixin add C3 end    adds a mixin at the end the mixin list
             obj mixin add C3 3      adds a mixin at the 3rd position
             obj mixin delete ::C3   removes the mixin from the mixin list

        The same semantics are available as well for filter, instmixin 
        and instfilter. This change is fully backward compatible.
        {filter,instfilter,mixin,instmixin}append are deprecated now.


 For more details about the changes, please consult the ChangeLog and documentation.

MORE INFO
  General and more detailed information about XOTcl and its components
  can be found at http://www.xotcl.org


Best regards,

Gustaf Neumann
Uwe Zdun
