Oops, I did not mean to be harsh and apologize for coming across that way. Tcl8 introduced the Tcl_Obj and a completely new api to deal with them. The old stri

Oops, I did not mean to be harsh and apologize for coming across that way. Tcl8 introduced the Tcl_Obj and a completely new api to deal with them. The old string-based interfaces were kept in place, because we value back compat a lot. They are flagged as deprecated in the manual pages and should only be used by legacy Tcl7 code, or when performance is known not to be an issue. As to printing the list to the console: that should compute a string representation of the list object without discarding the representation as a list.