Examples of extensions to ksh93 include the Desk Top KornShell (dtksh) and the Tksh. The Desktop KornShell (an improvement from wksh, based on ksh88), is part of the Common Desktop Environment (CDE). The CDE is being (or will be) shipped as a standard part of most Unix systems. dtksh allows users to develop Motif user interfaces using the new KornShell command and programming language.
-- [M. Bolsky, D. Korn, The New KornShell Command and Programming Language,Prentice Hall, 1995]
. Like Tcl, KornShell allows users to extend the language by adding new commands. KornShell was chosen by CDE to be the underlying scripting language for several reasons. One reason is that users who have programmed in either the Bourne Shell or KornShell are able to write scripts without having to learn a new language. Since there is a large community of ksh users, many people fit into this category. Another reason is that KornShell conforms to the IEEE P1003.2 and ISO 9945-2 shell standards.
--[POSIX - Part 2: Shell and Utilities, IEEE Standard 1003.2, ISO/IEC 9945-2, IEEE, 1993]
. Nearly a million copies of dtksh were expected to be shipped by the end of 1995.
--[K. Dawley, ``J. Stephen Pendergrast: On Desktop KornShell'', Innovations, Addison-Wesley, Spring 1995]
Despite the strengths that dtksh has as a scripting language, users often prefer to use Tk rather than the Motif API for developing user interfaces. It can be harder to develop user interfaces using dtksh because the set of graphics primitives included with dtksh is similar to the interface to Motif and X Intrinsics, which were designed to be used with a low level language.
--[S. Raney, ``A comparison of Tcl/Tk, the Desktop KornShell and MetaCard'', The X Resource, Issue 11, O'Reilly]
With the growing popularity of Tk, there have been efforts to port Tk to other programming languages so users of these languages can take advantage of Tk's features. There are versions of Tk for both Perl (TkPerl),
[[ M. Beattie, ``TkPerl - A port of the Tk toolkit to Perl5'', Very High Level Languages Proceedings, USENIX, 1994]
and Scheme (STk)
[ E. Gallesio, ``Embedding a Scheme Interpreter in the Tk Toolkit'', Proceedings of the Tcl/Tk 1993 Workshop, USENIX, 1993 ]
There has been growing demand for a toolkit with the strengths of ksh as a scripting language coupled with the strengths of Tk has for building user interfaces. The tksh product attempts to address these demands.
The tksh product allows Tcl applications such as Tk to run without modification using shell scripts in place of Tcl scripts. The implementation serves as an interface to ksh93 internals which are similar to those found in Tcl (variable traces, built-in commands, lists, hash tables, etc.). Tksh library calls emulate the behavior of Tcl using the ksh93 library. In addition, Tksh allows both shell and Tcl code to be interpreted.