Re:Great news (Score 1)

A non-starter? You're wrong!

Tcl is great!

I've used Python extensively and i still prefer Tcl (8.4) for many projects. Both have their strengths. I rather liked Python's OO abilities and use of tuples, but the way Tcl works magic with data is just so much more convenient to me (i do a lot of test automation). Now with the addition of the OO framework and dicts in 8.5, it makes a significant improvement in the areas i liked python for (less I/O intensive programming) and maybe i will just stick to Tcl now.

The OO stuff in 8.5 is not a bolted on kludge. A great deal of thought and experience went into this. Note though that the while the OO framework is done, it needs some supporting structure to make it easier to use. I think some are already done. For now i will just add my own. It should be possible to create XOTcl like OO programs with TclOO, and that ought to be superior to Python in terms of flexibility.

Memory management: i am pretty sure that objects that go out of scope are cleaned up automatically. Memory management in Tcl is bound to work a little bit different because the concept of references is not mappable to Tcl. But i'm not convinced that memory management will be really more difficult than in Python. You're probably confusing *can* manually destroy with *have to* manually destroy.