Practical Programming in Tcl & Tk, Third Edition

Call by Name Using upvar

Use the upvar command when you need to pass the name of a variable, as opposed to its value, into a procedure. The upvar command associates a local variable with a variable in a scope up the Tcl call stack. The syntax of the upvar command is:

upvar ?level? varName localvar
					

The level argument is optional, and it defaults to 1, which means one level up the Tcl call stack. You can specify some other number of frames to go up, or you can specify an absolute frame number with a #number syntax. Level #0 is the global scope, so the global foo command is equivalent to:

upvar #0 foo foo

The variable in the uplevel stack frame can be either a scalar variable, an array element, or an array name. In the first two cases, the local ...