[Tutor] Troubled by Tkinter questions

[Jeff Shannon]

Bob Gailer wrote:

> My apologies too; I did not mean to jump on you explicitly; its just 
> that there's been a lot of Tkinter traffic. I just did a Google search 
> and found "TKInter is a Python package that provides access to the 
> TCL/TK environment." I did not know this. I thought it was a separate 
> product with a Python interface. 


Just to be clear -- Tkinter is a Python interface to the Tk gui toolkit 
(TK INTERface -- get it?).  Tk was originally designed for use with the 
Tcl language, and the two have been tightly bound for a long time -- so 
much so that you see references to Tcl/Tk more often than for either of 
them separately.  However, Tk also has Python (Tkinter) and Perl 
(PerlTk) interfaces.  I don't know about PerlTk, but in the Tkinter 
case, it's a matter of Python driving Tcl which drives the Tk toolkit.

Since Tkinter is part of the standard Python distribution, it's not 
surprising that there's lots of questions about it here.  But it's also 
a kind of specialized sub-area, and (it seems to me) it *would* be 
suitable to have a separate mailing list devoted to it.  Whether such a 
list already exists or not, though, I have no idea -- there's a number 
of different GUI toolkits for Python, and I personally prefer wxPython 
to Tkinter, so I haven't kept track of what's available for Tkinter support.

Jeff Shannon
Technician/Programmer
Credit International