TIP: 151 Title: Remove -e: Command Line Option from tclsh and wish Version: $Revision: 1.7 $ Author: Don Porter Author: Don Porter Author: Donal K. Fellows State: Final Type: Project Vote: Done Created: 22-Aug-2003 Post-History: Tcl-Version: 8.5 ~ Abstract This TIP proposes removal of the -e: command line option to tclsh and wish that was Accepted as part of [137]. ~ Background [137] was Accepted today. However, there were a few NO votes objecting to the new ''-e:'' form of the ''-encoding'' command line option for specifying the encoding of a startup script to tclsh and wish. Those voting NO only objected to that part of [137] while supporting the rest as a solid proposal that will improve Tcl. Among those voting YES, no one explicitly embraced the ''-e:'' command line option as something they required. Some voting YES opined that the ''-e:'' option was a wart that could be fixed later. Based on those comments, [137] would have been better had the ''-e:'' form of the command line option not been part of the proposal. This TIP proposes nothing more than removing Acceptance of the ''-e:'' form of the ''-encoding'' command line option. Without the controversial ''-e:'' proposal, I believe [137] would have had unanimous approval. ~ Rationale The use of ''-e:'' as a command line option to tclsh or wish suffers when compared with the perl program. The ''perl -e'' option for evaluation of a Perl script provided on the command line is very well known, and it's a mistake to add something to tclsh that looks similar, but is in fact very different. [137] proposed both ''-encoding'' and the ''-e:'' form. There's really no need to add multiple ways to do the same thing. The Rationale in [137] for the ''-e:'' form is solely to support the 32-character limit in some Unices for their ''#!'' lines. However, the ''-e:'' form does not really solve that problem. For example: | #!/usr/local/bin/tclsh8.5 -e:iso8859-15 | 12345678901234567890123456789012 Here we see that we still run afoul of the 32-character limit when tclsh is installed in the default location. Even longer encoding names exist which magnify the problem, and altering the installation location will not necessarily help: | #!/usr/bin/tclsh8.5 -e:iso8859-15 | 12345678901234567890123456789012 (This is actually an insidious failure mode in that it leads to the script being sourced with a valid but incorrect encoding.) Conversely, we already have an effective general workaround for the 32-character limit problem: | #!/bin/sh | # \ | exec tclsh -encoding iso8859-15 "$0" ${1+"$@"} So, ''-e:'' doesn't solve a problem we don't really have, and it's controverisal. We should remove it. ~ Proposal Remove (Acceptance of) the ''-e:'' set of command line options to the programs ''tclsh'' and ''wish''. ~ Compatibility Since no version of Tcl or Tk has been released supporting the ''-e:'' command line option, there are no compatibility issues to resolve. ~ Copyright This document is placed in the public domain.