Changes in Behavior

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There are few differences between the behavior of bytecode files and Tcl scripts that are not compiled. This section explains these differences.

TclPro Compiler has the following limitations:

• Only those procedures that are defined at the top level can be compiled.
• The info body command on compiled procedures does not provide meaningful information; see "Example 1: Cloning Procedures"

However, these limitation do not prevent the affected procedures from being compiled at runtime. The contents of the bytecode file are a representation of the internal structures of the compiled Tcl script, without the source code. Procedures defined in the source file are compiled and their internal structures are also stored without source code. Thus, compiled procedure bodies cannot be read or accessed through the info body command. As a consequence, you cannot depend on being able to read procedure bodies in the bytecode, as shown in Example 1.

The command info body on a compiled procedure cannot return the actual body of the procedure because that information is not available. Instead, it returns a fabricated script containing:

• A comment, which identifies this body of code as belonging to a compiled procedure.
• An error command: this is used as an aide in detecting unsupported uses of info body, as shown in Example 1.

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