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Perl/Tk FAQ part 1 of 5 - Getting Started
*****************************************

______________________________________________________________________



5. How do I build it?

In general, building perl/Tk requires:

 1. A made & installed perl (requires a C language compiler). You may
   need different versions of perl depending on which version of Tk you
   wish to run.
 2. A C language compiler for the Tk code itself.
 3. A linkable Xlib (.o, .so, .a, etc.) for X-windows.

Perl/Tk has been successfully built using various vendors' cc compilers, as
well as with the free GNU gcc compiler. A make utility of some sort (
make/gmake) will be extremely helpful.

The versions of the various Perl utilities that you need on hand are roughly
as follows:


Utility     Version              Tk version/comments
perl        5.001m               Tk-b8 (not 5.001n)
perl        5.002b1f (or higher) Tk-b9 (9.01 recommended)
perl        5.002b1f (or higher) Tk-b9.01
perl        5.002                Tk-b10
MakeMaker   4.18 (or higher)     Tk-b8
MakeMaker   5.14 (or higher)     Tk-b9.01
xsubpp

Step - by - step the commands to build the Tk extension to Perl are (for the
dynamically linked version) roughly as follows:

 1. Install Perl (5.001m for Tk-b8 [not 5.001n], at least 5.002b1f for
   b9.01) For code locations see a CPAN site (separate question in this
   FAQ), the actual installation instructions come bundled in the
   perl***.tar.gz distribution file. (Perl Configure & make troubles are
   beyond the scope of this FAQ - please see the Perl FAQ itself for
   more help with this critical step.)
 2. Unpack perl/Tk outside the Perl distribution
   (i.e. outside the perl build, perl install, or perl lib areas).
   gunzip Tk-b*.tar.gz
   tar -xvf Tk-b*.tar
   (this area Tk-b*/ will be referred to as your ``Tk build'' directory)
   (optional: with Tk-b9.01, to avert most pod2man errors later on
   you may wish to apply Nick's document patch.
 3. If necessary remove any previous installed version of perl/Tk (see
   below).
 4. Compile and test.
   cd Tk-b*
   perl Makefile.PL
   make
   basic_demo (modify #! line if nec., or specify /path/to/perl
   ./basic_demo)
   warning if you build Tk with perl5.002gamma then change the line in
   basic_demo from
   use lib ./blib;
   to
   use lib qw(blib/arch blib/lib);
 5. Install.
   make install

(The statically linked instructions are different - see the INSTALL file for
explicit instructions.)

If you had a previously working version of Tk installed, you may need to
resurrect the Makefile for it and execute:

    make uninstall
    make realclean

before you unpack the new version. (The uninstall target of MakeMaker is
relatively new so please be careful.)

On the perl Makefile.PL step it may be necessary to give explicit
locations of required libraries and/or include headers. For example:

    perl Makefile.PL X11=/usr/local/X11R5

or

    perl Makefile.PL X11INC=/usr/local/share/X11R5/include \
                     X11LIB=/usr/local/arch/X11R5/lib

There are system and site dependencies in all of the above steps. However,
the largest single source of build trouble comes from not using the latest
versions of the various utilities (C compiler, make, etc.). In particular
ensure that when you say perl Makefile.PL that the perl that gets
invoked is up to date - use which perl and perl -v to determine this.
If necessary specify the full path name to your perl5 interpreter/compiler.
(For good reason a lot of people do not simply rm their working perl 4
interpreter/compiler when upgrading to perl 5!)

If you still run into trouble take a look at the INSTALL, the README and
the README file for your specific system (e.g. README.AIX,
README.OSF, etc.). You might also find your system mentioned in the ptk
hyper-mail archive at:

    http://pubweb.bnl.gov/~ptk/
or
    http://www.rosat.mpe-garching.mpg.de/mailing-lists/ptk/
or
    ftp://ftp.ccd.bnl.gov/pub/ptk/archives/

or the Perl 5 Porters page at:

    http://www.nicoh.com/cgi-bin/lwgate/PERL5-PORTERS/
    http://www.rosat.mpe-garching.mpg.de/mailing-lists/Perl5-Porters/

If you wish to discuss your Tk buld problems with others run and save the
output from the myConfig script in the Tk build directory (the output may
already be in the myConfig.out file from your Tk-b# build directory), as
well as the myconfig script in your perl build directory. It is often helpful
to include the output of either (or both) of these scripts in your discussion.

Presented here are the beginnings of a list of problems associated with
building Tk-b# on various platforms (for help building perl itself please
refer to the Perl FAQ). This list is in no way complete nor authoritative
(nor is it necessarily even up-to-date!) but simply lists problems people
have reported. Keep in mind that your installation may differ (e.g. location
differences such as /usr/bin/perl vs. /usr/local/bin/perl)
even if its the same platform listed here:

Unices:
=======

AIX:
   As of perl5.002b & Tk-b9.01 README.AIX says no patching is
   necessary.

   For Tk-b8: modifying the perl.exp file may be necessary. There
   is a patch in Tk-b8/README.AIX. It may be necessary to make
   regen_headers after the patch.
BSD4.4:
HPUX:
   Most people seem to prefer the dynamic linking afforded by a recent
   version of the gcc compiler on this system.
Linux:
   John C. Wingenbach indicates that should you encounter an error
   message like Cannot find -lX11 anywhere at
   ./myConfig line 184 when running your perl
   Makefile.PL (under Slakware 3.0) that you should be more
   specific about -l/path/to/libX11.a.
   Adam Wasserman <[email protected]> has graciously
   provided a compilation of Linux compilation trials & tribulations. It
   is an (as yet un-edited) document available at:
   http://w4.lns.cornell.edu/~pvhp/ptk/etc/linux_compile_compilation.txt
NeXTSTEP:
   Gerd Knops recently posted a discussion of the steps to get perl
   running on several NeXTSTEPs to p5p.
OSF/1:
   As of perl5.002b & Tk-b9.01 you will probably be able to follow the
   usual instructions. John Stoffel <[email protected]> reports that if you
   use gcc (rather than cc) you should use at least version 2.7.2

   For Tk-b8: make is reputedly not up to the task on this system.
   Tk-b8/README.OSF recommends gmake instead.
   Stephane Bortzmeyer <[email protected]> reports a successful
   build with Perl 5.001m, xsubpp 1.922, MakeMaker 4.23. He points
   out that it was necessary for him to upgrade the xsubpp and
   MakeMaker that he received with his copy of Perl5.001m.
SCO:
   For Tk-b8: Eric J. Bohm <[email protected]> reported a need
   to comment out line(s) from myConfig and GNUMakefiles using
   GNU make 3.67. (See Tk-b8/README.SCO for specifics.)
SGI (Irix):
   Matthew Black <[email protected]> recently mentioned a need to
   apply "patchSG0000596" to get perl sockets to work. His message
   was copywritten and is not included here. Send e-mail to him to find
   out where the get "patchSG0000596".
Suns:
   SunOS (BSD):
   For Tk-b8: Tom Tignor <[email protected]> reports the following
   on SunOS (sun4m sparc): Tue, 28 Nov 1995 13:19:42
   In trying to make, I got a "write: argument mismatch" error for the
   file ptK/Lang.h. I looked at the file and found the offending function,
   Tcl_GetOpenFile, which has a third argument called "doWrite" (not
   "write") in tkGlue.c. I changed the argument from "write" to
   "doWrite" in Lang.h and it's compiling fine (for the moment. :)
   Solaris (System V):
   For Tk-b8: There is trouble getting perl to use Socket routines (i.e.
   trouble with make perl itself not necessarily trouble with Tk-b#).
   See the perl FAQ for more info or the .shar file that Tom
   Christiansen occasionally posts to comp.lang.perl.misc. Further
   information on perl inter process communication can be found in
   the perlipc* files at:
   ftp://ftp.perl.com/perl/info/everything_to_know/.
SVR4:
   For Tk-b8: Martha G. Armour and Len Reed report on two separate
   hardware platforms running SVR4 - extensive details in
   Tk-b8/README.SVR4. Interestingly, they report no trouble at all
   on Linux.
SVR5:
Ultrix:

non-Unix(ish)es:
================

Information on non-Unix(ish) perl platforms may be obtained from the
perl metaFAQ (pmFAQ) at

   http://www.khoros.unm.edu/staff/neilb/perl/metaFAQ/entry-04.html

or the Perl 5 Porters (p5p) page at:

   http://www.nicoh.com/cgi-bin/lwgate/PERL5-PORTERS/
   http://www.rosat.mpe-garching.mpg.de/mailing-lists/Perl5-Porters/

In general your non-Unix platform must be able to support perl 5 and Xlib
(a C compiler and a make utility are tremendously useful in this regard).
Once you get perl 5 running be sure your MakeMaker and Autoload perl
utilities are working too.

68K: (perhaps your best bet is Mach Ten with X, or MacLinux/MacBSD (?)
Acorn:
Amiga: (see pmFAQ or p5p)
Atari: (see pmFAQ or p5p)
DOS: (see pmFAQ or p5p)
Human68K: (see pmFAQ or p5p)
LynxOS: (see pmFAQ or p5p)
Mac:
   Check the ports/mac/ directory at CPAN site (when last checked
   in January 1996 the binary in this dir corresponded to perl4.036)
   Matthias Neeracher is leading the effort to implement perl 5 for the
   Mac. There is also a mailing list for MacPerl: send a message body of
   "subscribe" to <[email protected]>. The list
   itself is addressed as <[email protected]> There is a
   hypermail archive of the MacPerl list at
   http://www.its.unimelb.edu.au:801/hma/pub/macperl/

   There is a FAQ-like question & answer document for MacPerl at:
   http://err.ethz.ch/members/neeri/macintosh/perl-qa.html
   (see also pmFAQ or p5p)

   The latest versions of the source code for Tcl/Tk have build
   directories for Macs.
OS/2:
   For perl itself see the os2/README file that comes with perl
   (5.002beta). Ilya Zakharevich <[email protected]>
   recommends a GNU make patch available from
   ftp://ftp.math.ohio-state.edu/pub/users/ilya/os2
VMS:
   Charles Bailey <[email protected]> has done a wonderful
   job porting perl 5 to VMS. It can be built using MMS, MMK, or VMS
   GMake or IMake. Not (yet?!) distributed on CPAN it is available
   from:
   ftp://genetics.upenn.edu/perl5/perl5_vmstest.zip
   (Recommendations: do not try anything but a VMS web browser to
   follow the hyperlink as browsers on other OSes do not grok the
   protocol on VMS ftp servers too well. If you do not have a VMS
   web-browser then use line mode ftp instead. Do use an UNZIP
   specifically compiled for the VMS file system.)

   Angel Li has ported Tcl7.5a2 and Tk4.1a2 to VMS and maintains a
   web page at
   http://www.rsmas.miami.edu/vms-tcl.html
Win 95:
   (see Win NT, DOS, or the page at:
   http://www.inxpress.net/~moewes/computer/perl95.html)
Win NT:
   See hip info on (perl5 only) at:
   http://info.hip.com/ntperl/ There is a mailing list for
   porters at: <[email protected]>. There is also a mailing list
   for users at: <[email protected]>. Questions concerning
   either list can be addressed by sending e-mail to:
   <[email protected]>. To unsubscribe from
   perl-win32-users send a message of unsubscribe
   perl-win32-users to <[email protected]>.

   The latest versions of the source code for Tcl/Tk have build
   directories for PC-style microcomputers.

   Nick Ing-Simmons has recently (Jan 96) commented on the steps
   necessary to get perl/Tk running on these sorts of platforms. Check
   out:
   http://sun20.ccd.bnl.gov/~ptk/archive/ptk.1995.12/0191.html
   .
Xenix: (see pmFAQ or p5p)

______________________________________________________________________



6. Where is the Documentation?

Documentation is "in the works": there are several books dealing with
perl/Tk in progress, and a growing FAQ (the document you are presently
reading).

In the meantime the available information resources can be split into
Perl/Tk, Perl, and Tcl/Tk documentation categories:

Perl/Tk Specific Documentation
==============================

The man pages
-------------

As of Tk-b9.01 the various perl/Tk pod documents are converted to roff
format and installed as part of the perl/Tk "make install" process. If
you have a recent verion of perl/Tk try something like man 3 Tk::Tk if
this does not work check with you system administrator for the proper
MANPATH. (Tk-b9.01 people may be interested in applying Nick's
document patch to keep pod2man from complaining too much during
make install.)

The newsgroup
-------------

The newsgroup name is comp.lang.perl.tk and this FAQ will be periodically
posted to that group. The newsgroup is the appropriate place to post
questions - yes even simple ones! (Although answers may be long in
coming...:-(

The nTk/pTk mailing list
------------------------

The mailing list is a supplement to the newsgroup comp.lang.perl.tk. The
nTk/pTk Mailing List Archive remains a useful source of information
however, and is accesible at either http://pubweb.bnl.gov/~ptk/, or via ftp at
ftp://ftp.ccd.bnl.gov/pub/ptk/archives/ (both in the USA). You may search
the contents of the mailing list archives thanks to a cgi-bin script written by
Achim Bohnet in Germany at:

    http://www.rosat.mpe-garching.mpg.de/mailing-lists/ptk/

To remove yourself from the mailing list, you can send mail to
[email protected] with the following command in the body of your
e-mail message:

    unsubscribe ptk joe.user@somewhere (Joe D. User)

(To send a message to all recipients of the mailing list send e-mail to
[email protected]. - but please consider posting to the newsgroup instead.)

The demo programs
-----------------

Examine (and try running) the code in your Tk-b#/, perl5/Tk/demos/,
and perl5/Tk/demos/widget_lib/ directories.
In order to determine where on your system the perl5/ directory is
located type the following one-line perl command (at your shell prompt -
this is not a line from a perl script):

    perl -e 'print join("\n",@INC),"\n";'

If that command does not turn up a perl5/ directory then make sure that
you are running perl 5 with the following: perl -v (again this can be
entered at the shell prompt).

The pod documentation
---------------------

As of Tk-b9.01 the various perl/Tk pod documents are converted to roff
format and installed as part of the perl/Tk installation process. If you have a
recent verion of perl/Tk try something like man 3 Tk::Tk. If this does
not work check your man path with

    perl -e 'use Config; print $Config{'man1dir'},"\n",$Config{'man3dir'},"\n"'

And if you still cannot find the manual pages check with your system
administrator for the proper MANPATH and/or Tk-# installation version.

In your perl5/Tk/ directory there should be a number of .pod files
including (but not limited to) UserGuide.pod. The files are examples of
the perl "plain old documentation" format and are just about human
readable as they are (e.g. you may more, cat, or less them; or send them
to a printer). They are intended to be run through a re-formatting program
however. Such programs include pod2man, pod2html, and pod2latex
(which get installed when you install perl) or pod2text which was
written by Tom Christiansen. A command line like the following (but
subject to local variations) should work for you:

    pod2man perl5/Tk/UserGuide.pod | nroff -man | more

There should even be a perl script to run the above command for you. It is
executed as:

    perldoc perl5/Tk/UserGuide

Note that if there is pod like documentation in a perl module you may also
execute perldoc on it as in:

    perldoc ColorEditor.pm

(please note that not all .pm mod files have pod embedded.) If you want that
GUI look and feel (like xman) make the appropriate changes to the following
script:

    #!/usr/bin/perl
    use Tk;
    use Tk::Pod;
    my $m = new MainWindow;
    $m -> Pod(-file => 'Tk/ColorEditor.pm');
    MainLoop;

The conversion to latex proceeds as you might guess, namely:

    pod2latex UserGuide.pod

(according to the 1.1 version of pod2latex this will automatically
generate a UserGuide.tex file hence you must have write access to the
directory in which the above command is carried out.)

You may also convert the pod pages to HTML (the HyperText Markup L
anguage of World Wide Web documents). For example, command lines like
the following (but subject to local variations - is your web_browser
configured to allow local access to a file? - if not do this on a web-serving
machine) should work for you:

    pod2html perl5/Tk/UserGuide.pod > UserGuide.html
    web_browser_invocation UserGuide.html

In addition there is, on an experimental basis, a place to view the Tk-b9.01
.pod->.html files from the perl5/Tk directory at:

    http://w4.lns.cornell.edu/~pvhp/ptk/pod/

(Please note that the perl pod specification does not allow for markup within
a verbatim paragraph - yet font changes often seem to be in either the
<XMP></XMP> or the <PRE></PRE> HTML environments generated by
running many of these .pod files through the latest version of pod2html.
Alert browsers are welcome to notify me of any errors in the hand-altered
html files.)

Translators pod2texinfo, pod2fm, etc., also exist. Check a CPAN site
for these scripts if you do not already have them.

In your Tk-b#/doc directory there should be a number of .ht files. These
are conversions of Tcl/Tk man pages to html. (If you wish to browse them at
your own site you may wish to look at Mark Elston's cvtht script, or
configure your web-server/browser to recognize the .ht extension as a
text/html mime.type.) The .ht are helpful to the perl/Tk programmer
trying to remember the name of an optional argument to pass to a given
widget primitive. Note that insofar as these pages do specify syntax it
pertains to Tcl/Tk not perl/Tk, hence they must be translated. The pages are
on the web at:

    http://pubweb.bnl.gov/~ptk/doc/index.html
    http://w4.lns.cornell.edu/~pvhp/ptk/doc/

A miscellany of internet perl/Tk resources includes:

World Wide Web - perl/Tk man pages
    http://pubweb.bnl.gov/~ptk/doc/index.html
    http://w4.lns.cornell.edu/~pvhp/ptk/doc/
    http://w4.lns.cornell.edu/~pvhp/ptk/pod/
Newsgroups
    comp.lang.perl.tk
    comp.lang.perl.misc
    comp.lang.perl.anounce
    comp.lang.tcl
    comp.answers
    news.answers
Perl/Tk FAQ-Archives (ftp sites) [Note: FAQ may be many separate files]
 (see also CPAN sites)
    ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/comp.lang.perl.tk
    ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet-by-hierarchy/comp/lang/perl/tk
    ftp://ftp.uu.net/usenet/news.answers/perl-faq/ptk-faq
    ftp://ftp.ccd.bnl.gov/pub/ptk/                   130.199.54.188
    ftp://ftp.ccd.bnl.gov/pub/ptk/ptkFAQ.txt         130.199.54.188
    ftp://ftp.wpi.edu/perl5/pTk-FAQ                  130.215.24.209
    ftp://perl.com/pub/perl/doc/ptkFAQ.gz            199.45.129.30
    ftp://perl.com/pub/perl/doc/ptkFAQ.ps.gz         199.45.129.30
WWW-FAQ for perl/Tk
    http://w4.lns.cornell.edu/~pvhp/ptk/ptkTOC.html
    http://w4.lns.cornell.edu/~pvhp/ptk/ptkFAQ.html
World Wide Web - perl/Tk info sites
    http://pubweb.bnl.gov/~ptk/
    http://fxfx.com/kgr/compound/ (Perl Tk Compound Widget Page)
    http://w4.lns.cornell.edu/~pvhp/ptk/ptkIMG.html (FAQ image supplement)
    http://w4.lns.cornell.edu/~pvhp/ptk/etc/
The Mailing list
    [email protected]
    [email protected]

Perl Specific Documentation
===========================

There are a growing number Perl books available. A more complete
Perl-bibliographic discussion than that given here is available in the Perl
FAQ at:

    http://www.perl.com/perl/faq/Q2.2.html

The two early Perl books by Schwartz and Wall are very helpful (even if they
do pertain to perl 4 and not 5. Beware that perl/Tk makes extensive use of
perl 5 features.):

 Learning Perl (The Llama)
 Randal L. Schwartz
 Copyright � 1993 O'Reilly & Associates Inc.
 ISBN 1-56592-042-2 (English)
 ISBN 2-84177-005-2 (French)
 ISBN 3-930673-08-8 (German)
 ISBN 4-89502-678-1 (Japanese)

 Programming Perl (The Camel)
 Larry Wall and Randal L. Schwartz
 Copyright � 1991 O'Reilly & Associates Inc.
 ISBN 0-937175-64-1 (English)
 ISBN 3-446-17257-2 (German) (Programmieren in Perl, translator:
 Hanser Verlag)
 ISBN 4-89052-384-7 (Japanese)

For Perl 5 there will be an update to the Camel ("Learning More Perl"? the
Alpaca?) in preparation by Randal L. Schwartz, Tom Christiansen, Larry
Wall, and Stephen Potter, with a draft due at O'Reilly by the end of April
1996. There is some Perl5 (book material) information at:

    http://www.metronet.com/1h/perlinfo/perl5/

Jon Orwant (the organizer of the comp.lang.perl.tk newgroup) will have a
book on Perl 5 out in January 1996. (Please note that it is mostly about Perl
5, there is a some discussion of four simple Perl/Tk programs, but it is not a
book wholly devoted to Perl/Tk.) The relevant info:

 Perl 5 Interactive
 Jon Orwant
 The Waite Group Press
 ISBN: 1-57169-064-6

The perl 5 Quick Reference Guide (may require LaTeX for installation) can
be obtained from any CPAN ftp site. Detailed location information is also
available at the author's website:

    http://www.xs4all.nl/~jvromans/perlref.html

There is also the:

 Perl 5 Desktop Reference
 Johan Vromans
 Copyright � February 1996 O'Reilly & Associates Inc.
 ISBN: 1-56592-187-9; Order number: 1879

The multi-part perl 5 man pages are available (assuming they have been
installed in your MANPATH, type man perl, man perlmod etc.).

The perl man pages are also available on the web at a number of locations
including:

World Wide Web - perl 5 (.001m) man pages
  Australia
    http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~slf/perl5/perl.html
    http://bwyan.anu.edu.au/perl.html
  Austria
    http://www.cosy.sbg.ac.at/comp/lang/perl/perl5man/perl.html
  Brazil
    http://www.lsi.usp.br/perl5/
  Canada
    http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/perldoc/perl.html
    http://stoner.eps.mcgill.ca/perl/perl.html
  Germany
    http://www.t-informatik.ba-stuttgart.de/Perl5/perl.html
    http://www.dfv.rwth-aachen.de/doc/perl/perl.html
  Norway
    http://www.pvv.unit.no/sw/perl5/index.html
  Slovak Republic
    http://www.savba.sk/autori/perl/perl.html
  Slovenia
    http://www.ijs.si/perl/
  Taiwan
    http://www.ccu.edu.tw/perl5/index.html
  UK
    http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~richardd/perl5/perl.html
    http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/perl/perl.html
  USA
    http://www.metronet.com/0/perlinfo/perl5/manual/perl.html
    http://rhine.ece.utexas.edu/~kschu/perlman.html
    http://duggy.extern.ucsd.edu/perl/perl.html
    http://tbone.biol.scarolina.edu/~dean/perl/perl.html
    http://www.mit.edu:8001/perl/perl.html
    http://icg.stwing.upenn.edu/perl5/perl.html
    http://w4.lns.cornell.edu/public/compdoc/info/perl/perl.html

World Wide Web - perl 5.002 man pages (also useful for previous versions of perl 5)
  USA
    http://www.lafayette.edu/doughera/doughera/perl/manual/perl.html
    http://www.va.pubnix.com/staff/stripes/perlinfo/
    http://www.perl.com/perl/manual/
    http://128.84.219.39/public/perl/manual/

In addition to the CPAN ftp source sites, a miscellany of internet perl
resources includes:

Newsgroups
    comp.lang.perl.misc
    comp.lang.perl.announce
    comp.infosystems.www.authoring.cgi
    comp.answers
    news.answers
Perl FAQ-Archives (ftp sites) [Note: FAQ may be many separate files]
    (see also the CPAN sites)
  North America
    ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.answers/perl-faq/
    ftp://ftp.uu.net/usenet/news.answers/perl-faq  192.48.96.9
    ftp://ftp.khoros.unm.edu/pub/perl/faq.gz       198.59.155.28
  Europe
    ftp://ftp.cs.ruu.nl/pub/NEWS.ANSWERS/perl-faq/ 131.211.80.17
    ftp://src.doc.ic.ac.uk/packages/perl/FAQ       146.169.2.10
Gopher Perl FAQ
    gopher://gopher.metronet.com/11/perlinfo/faq
WWW-FAQ for Perl
    http://www.perl.com/perl/faq/
    http://www.smartpages.com/bngfaqs/comp/lang/perl/top.html
    http://www.smartpages.com/bngfaqs/comp/lang/perl/misc/top.html
    http://www.smartpages.com/bngfaqs/comp/lang/perl/announce/top.html
    http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/hypertext/faq/usenet/perl-faq/top.html
Perl for Win32 FAQ  (discusses Win95)
    http://info.hip.com/ntperl/PerlFaq.htm

Perl info sites
Gopher (:70)
  USA
    gopher://gopher.metronet.com/11h/perlinfo
World Wide Web (http:80)
  USA
    http://www.yahoo.com/Computers_and_Internet/Languages/Perl/index.html
    http://www.perl.com/
    http://www.khoros.unm.edu/staff/neilb/perl/home.html
    http://www.khoros.unm.edu:80/staff/neilb/perl/metaFAQ/
    http://www.metronet.com/perlinfo/
    http://www.metronet.com/perlinfo/perl5.html (Perl 5)
    http://www.eecs.nwu.edu/perl/perl.html
    http://128.84.219.39/public/perl/
    http://www.virtualschool.edu/mon/Perl.html
    http://www.hermetica.com/technologia/unexec/
    http://www.oac.uci.edu/indiv/ehood/perlWWW/
    http://web.sau.edu/~mkruse/www/scripts/
    http://orwant.www.media.mit.edu/the_perl_journal/
    http://www.perl.com/Architext/AT-allperl.html
    http://www.mispress.com/introcgi/
  UK
    http://pubweb.nexor.co.uk/public/perl/perl.html
    http://www.bio.cam.ac.uk/web/form.html
Web references to Perl mailing lists
    http://www.perl.com/perl/info/mailing-lists.html
    http://www.nicoh.com/cgi-bin/lwgate/PERL5-PORTERS/
    http://www.rosat.mpe-garching.mpg.de/mailing-lists/

Tcl/Tk Specific Documentation
=============================

The two Tcl/Tk books by Ousterhout and Welch are very good starting
points (you must however, translate the tcl-isms to perl in the sample
scripts):

 Tcl and the Tk Toolkit
 John K. Ousterhout
 Copyright � 1994 Addison-Wesley Publishing Company
 ISBN 0-201-63337-X (alk. paper)
 LOC QA76.73.T44097 1994; 005.13'3--dc20

 Practical Programming in Tcl and Tk
 Brent Welch
 Copyright � 1995 Prentice Hall
 ISBN 0-13-182007-9

Within the tclsh or wish shells your manpath includes the tcl/tk man
pages (which may not be in your login manpath). Thus from the % prompt
within either shell type commands like:

    % man -k Tk

The Tcl/Tk Reference Guide is also a source of useful information.
Although it's Tcl specific most perl/Tk commands can be, more or less,
easily derived from it. [As of Tk-b9.01 the names of some functions and
some configuration options have changed slightly from their Tcl/Tk
counterparts. With Tk-b9.01 (and higher) a great many functions start with
an upper case letter and continue with all lower case letters (e.g. there is a
perl/Tk Entry widget but no entry widget), and many configuration
options are all lower case (e.g. there is a perl/Tk highlightthickness
option but no highlightThickness option).] You may fetch the Tcl/Tk
Reference Guide (may require LaTeX for installation) from:

    ftp://ftp.slac.stanford.edu/software/TkMail/tkref-4.0.1.tar.gz 134.79.18.30
    ftp://ftp.aud.alcatel.com/tcl/docs/tkref-4.0.1.tar.gz          198.64.191.10

There are a number of other Tcl/Tk resources on the internet including:

Newsgroups
    comp.lang.tcl
    comp.infosystems.www.authoring.cgi
    comp.answers
    news.answers
FAQ-Archive (ftp) [Note: Tcl FAQ may be many files, Tk FAQ is one file]
    ftp://ftp.aud.alcatel.com/tcl/docs/                            198.64.191.10
    ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.answers/tcl-faq
    ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.answers/tcl-faq/tk
WWW-FAQ for Tcl/Tk
    http://www.smartpages.com/faqs/tcl-faq/top.html
    http://www.smartpages.com/bngfaqs/comp/lang/tcl/top.html
    http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/hypertext/faq/usenet/tcl-faq/top.html
    http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/hypertext/faq/bngusenet/comp/lang/tcl/top.html
    http://www.sco.com/Technology/tcl/Tcl.html
World Wide Web - Tcl/Tk info sites
  Canada
    http://web.cs.ualberta.ca/~wade/Auto/Tcl.html
  UK
    http://http2.brunel.ac.uk:8080/~csstddm/TCL2/TCL2.html
  USA
    http://www.yahoo.com/Computers_and_Internet/Languages/Tcl_Tk/index.html
    http://www.sunlabs.com/research/tcl/docs.html
    http://www.sunlabs.com/research/tcl/4.0.html
    http://www.sco.com/Technology/tcl/Tcl.html
    http://www.neosoft.com/tcl/
Tcl/Tk - miscellaneous extensions
    ftp://ftp.cme.nist.gov/pub/expect/
    http://www.cs.hut.fi/~kjk/porttk.html
    http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~ioi/tix/tix.html
    http://www.ece.cmu.edu/afs/ece/usr/svoboda/www/th/homepage.html
    http://www.tcltk.com/ [incr Tcl]
    http://www.neosoft.com/tcl/TclX.html
    http://www.eolas.com/eolas/webrouse/tcl.htm [WebWish]

______________________________________________________________________



7. How do I write scripts in perl/Tk?

Start your script as you would any perl script (e.g. #!/usr/bin/perl,
#!/usr/local/bin/perl, #!/opt/bin/perl, whatever, see the
perlrun(1) man page for more information).
Throwing the -w warning switch is recommended.
The use of the statement use strict; is recommended.
Use of the statement use Tk; is required.

A simple "Hello World!" widget script could be written as follows:

    #!/usr/local/bin/perl -w

    use strict;
    use Tk;

    my $main = new MainWindow;
    $main->Label(-text => 'Hello World!'
                 )->pack;
    $main->Button(-text => 'Quit',
                  -command => sub{exit}
                  )->pack;
    MainLoop;

The MainLoop; statement is the main widget event handler loop and is
usually found in perl/Tk scripts (usually near the end of the main procedure
after the widgets have been declared and packed). MainLoop; is actually
a function call and you may see it written as MainLoop();,
&Tk::MainLoop;, &Tk::MainLoop();, etc.

Note the use of the -> infix dereference operator. Most things in calls to
perl/Tk routines are passed by reference.

Note also the use of the => operator which is simply a synonym for the
comma operator. In other words, the arguments that get passed to Label
and Button in the above example are good old perl associative arrays (perl
5 people prefer to call them "hashes" however). Indeed, we might have
written the above as:

    #!/usr/local/bin/perl -w

    use strict;
    use Tk;

    my $main = new MainWindow;
    $main->Label(-text , 'Hello World!'
                 )->pack;
    $main->Button(-text , 'Quit',
                  -command , sub{exit}
                  )->pack;
    MainLoop;

Or even as:

    #!/usr/local/bin/perl -w
    use strict;
    use Tk;
    my $main = new MainWindow;

    my %hello = ('-text','Hello World!');
    my %quit_com = ('-text' => 'Quit', '-command' => sub{exit});

    $main->Label(%hello)->pack;
    $main->Button(%quit_com)->pack;
    MainLoop;

Note however, that the use of the => in the first method of writing this
script makes it look more "Tcl-ish" :-).

Lastly, we note the extensive use of the my function in most perl/Tk
programs. my is roughly equivalent to local in Perl 4 - but is purported to
be "faster and safer" as well as much more strictly local in scope. See
perlfunc(1) manpage for more information on my.

Other examples of code may be found in the perl5/Tk/demos/
directory and in perl5/Tk/demos/widget_lib/.

(A variant on this scipt called hello is available in the file
perl5/Tk/demos/hello in your own pTk distribution. Also, Source
code for this and other examples from UserGuide.pod may be found at
http://w4.lns.cornell.edu/~pvhp/ptk/pod/. To load code from the web save as
a local filename, edit the first line to point to your perl interpreter, then:
chmod u+x filename, then execute: filename.)

______________________________________________________________________



8. What widget types are available under perl/Tk?

The following Tk widget primitives are available under perl/Tk:

 o Button
 o Radiobutton
 o Checkbutton
 o Listbox
 o Scrollbar
 o Entry
 o Text
 o Canvas
 o Frame
 o Toplevel
 o Scale
 o Menu
 o Menubutton

A good introduction to these primitives and how they may be used in
conjunction with each other may be found in the widget demo script. Note
that all the widget demos have a "Show Code" button. To help figure out
what is happening in the script you may, when the window appears, edit the
text and instrument the code with print statements and then simply press
"Rerun Demo". Another place to see examples of the primitives (on the
web) is at:

    http://w4.lns.cornell.edu/~pvhp/ptk/ptkIMG.html (FAQ image supplement)

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