Year 2000 Compliant
Scriptics business infrastructure has been checked for Y2K compliance and to the best of our
knowledge we will not be materially impacted by the transition to the year 2000.
Scriptics Connect and all versions of TclPro, as well as all tools
and extensions that ship as part of TclPro are completely Year 2000
compliant. Tcl/Tk 8.0.x and higher are also Year 2000 compliant.
Earlier versions of Tcl can be compliant if your application avoids date
fields with 2-digit year fields.
A Tk application uses Tcl for its date manipulation,
so if you use Tcl/Tk 8.0, then your application is Year 2000 compliant.
An [incr Tcl] application also uses Tcl for its date manipulation.
[incr Tcl] version 3.0 uses Tcl 8.0, so it is Year 2000 compliant.
Here is a more complete discussion of the issues:
-
Before Tcl 7.5 (and Tk 4.1) there was no support for times or dates in Tcl.
Thus
these releases have no Year 2000 issues (but see the note below about
TclX).
- Tcl 7.5 (and Tk 4.1) introduced a new "clock" command that supports time and date
manipulation. The "clock" command allows years to be specified either
with two digits or four. If you use four digits everywhere then you
will not have any problems. However, if you use two-digit years then
years starting with 2000 will be rounded incorrectly. For example,
"00" is considered to be 1900 instead of 2000. There were also several
bugs in the original implementation that could cause problems related
to the year 2000.
- By the Tcl 7.6p2 (and Tk 4.2p2) release the bugs were fixed but all 2-digit years
were still assumed to be in the 20th Century.
- In Tcl/Tk 8.0 the clock parsing code was changed to match the POSIX
standard where 2-digit years from 70-99 are from the 20th century,
ones from 00-38 are from the 21st century, and all the rest are
undefined. With this release, Tcl is "clean" with respect to Year
2000 issues.
Thus, you need not worry about Year 2000 issues with Tcl/Tk unless you are
using Tcl version 7.5 or 7.6 with two-digit year numbers.
These correspond to Tk versions 4.1 and 4.2.
After Tk 4.2 and Tcl 7.6, both Tcl and Tk version numbers jumped to 8.0.
If you use the clock facilities in the TclX extension, then all of the bugs
described above are also present. Tcl's clock facilities were derived
from TclX, but after we added the "clock" command to the core the TclX
clock features were removed and reimplemented in terms of the new core
features. For example, if you're using TclX with Tcl 7.5 or earlier releases
then all of the bugs
described above for Tcl 7.5 will apply;
if you're using TclX with Tcl 8.0 or later then all of the problems are
fixed.
