I was looking at the Tcl 8.4 man page for ‘split’ and saw this example code:

## Split into fields on colons
set fields [split $rec ":"]
## Assign fields to variables and print some out...
lassign $fields userName password uid grp longName homeDir shell

It shows how to split a string using ‘:’ as the delimiter. The interesting part is the ‘lassign’ statement. I’d never seen that before. I’ve always done something annoying like this:

set fields [split $rec ":"]
set userName [lindex $fields 0]
set password [lindex $fields 1]
set uid [lindex $fields 2]
set grp [lindex $fields 3]
set longName [lindex $fields 4]
set homeDir [lindex $fields 5]
set shell [lindex $fields 6]

How could I have overlooked ‘lassign’ all these years? After berating my idiocy for a few minutes, I tried ‘lassign’ out and Tcl replied ‘invalid command name’ . Turns out I’m not as stupid as I thought. :-) ‘lassign’ is new in Tcl 8.5 (but seems to have snuck in the backdoor of the 8.4 docs). I decided to see what else was coming in 8.5.

• Dictionaries. These are associative arrays which reportedly are better than Tcl arrays, but I’m not sure why.
• ** as an exponentiation operator
• Instead of doing: if {[lsearch -exact $list $item] != -1}, the new ‘in’ operator lets you do if {$item in $list}. There’s also a ‘ni’ operator for ‘not in’.
• Plenty of other stuff, none of which really caught my eye.

Tcl 8.5 is still alpha, so I’m sticking with 8.4 (and my annoying code) for the moment.

foreach {userName password uid grp longName homeDir shell} [lrange fields 0 6] {break}
# We do an lrange here, otherwise values would be set wrong
# in case someone accidentally supplies a list with too many elements,
# because then the foreach loop would run more than once