Turning Eight

Turning Eight

It started on 19 January 2005. Hard to believe it has been eight years since I first took up the keyboard and started writing expect-lite.

Of course, it was a few weeks before expect-lite could actually do anything useful. But the idea of keeping it simple, and sending > and expecting < was there.

In software development, as a rule, major versions don't have to be compatible with previous versions, but expect-lite has kept backward compatibility since those early days of 2005. It has been a long-standing goal to be able to run a script written years ago on the latest version of expect-lite.

• 1.x - Basic functionality
• 2.x - Added Dynamic Variables, Better Var parsing, Embedded Expect
• version 2.4.0, expect-lite goes open source!
• 3.x - Looping using %labels,  multiple sessions (*FORK), break points (*INTERACT), Colour
• 4.x - Integrated Debugger with ^\, Integrated as a TCL library, Code Blocks [ ], User defined script help using ;;; and Logging to a file (*LOG)

Fast forward 8 years, and almost 10,000 downloads later, and expect-lite is still going strong. Many of the features added are a direct result of users' comments. For example, built in logging to a file using *LOG, has has been on the request list for a while, but I do listen, and now it is in the latest release.

Thank you for all of those comments and feature requests over the years, I look forward to more.

Craig...
[author and maintainer of expect-lite]