Source Files

• portions of tclUtil.c

Public Interface

• Tcl_SplitList
• Tcl_Merge
• Tcl_ScanElement
• Tcl_ScanCountedElement
• Tcl_ConvertElement
• Tcl_ConvertCountedElement

Private Interface

• TclMaxListLength
• TclFindElement
• TclFindDictElement
• TclCopyAndCollapse
• TclScanElement
• TclConvertElement
• TclNeedSpace

Directly Depends On Public Interface

• Parsing and Evaluation
• string Object Type
• Allocation
• Panic

Directly Depends On Private Interface of

• Parsing and Evaluation

Discussion

These are the utilities that manage the parsing and generation of string representations of Tcl list values. They are inherently limited to the int range for both total bytes in the string and total elements in the list. They also are written for the Modified UTF-8 encoding expected of string values in Tcl 8. Any changes to those assumption in Tcl 9 will require something new, either revisions to these routines, or development of new routines with broader capabilities while these persist as limited legacy support mechanisms.

The public dependence on Parsing and Evaluation and string Object Type is entirely in error reporting and could concievably be factored out if there appears some need for that.

TIP 407 details the functioning and offers possible changes that might be considered.