>  Like Michael, I just wish we had done it sooner so we could use $*foo and [*foo]
>  or something more compact than {expand} - but I digress.

Here's a thought to consider.

Given that the poll says only a solution targetted for 9.0 will be
accepted, an incompatibility (preferably as small as possible) is
permitted.

So we could combine the word-prefix-syntax architecture of {expand}...
with the use of the somewhat more eye-pleasing prefix $* .

In current Tcl, a word that begins with literal $* will also begin with
literal $* after substitution.  If we made use of $* as the expansion
prefix for a word in Tcl 9, then anyone expecting literal $* would be
forced to produce it via some substitution.  For example,

	set punctuation $*&!^@#
	
would have to become something like

	set punctuation \$*&!^@#
or
	set punctuation \u0024*&!^@#
	
That's the extent of the incompatibility.  Probably less impact than
choosing ` .  Perhaps less than the :: in command names incompatibility
from the 7 ->  8 transition.

Otherwise the modified proposal would be the same as TIP 157.  Just
replace the prefix string {expand} proposed there with the prefix 
string $* .

| Don Porter          Mathematical and Computational Sciences Division |
| donald.porter@[...].gov             Information Technology Laboratory |
| http://math.nist.gov/~DPorter/                                  NIST |
|______________________________________________________________________|



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