Handling of special characters

[borneoa]

running jimsh from today's master branch

. set a "x2}"
x2}
. lappend a 1
x2\} 1

which is correct. But

. set a "{x2"
{x2
. lappend a 1
x2 1

looses the special character {.
The last test with tclsh 8.6.13 returns error unmatched open brace in list instead.

So, different behavior and both looks incorrect to me.
Is there a "correct" way in Tcl to describe a string value that starts with the special character {?

[msteveb]

One difference between Jim and Tcl is that Jim will never fail to convert a string to a list. It will "do something sensible" instead of throwing an error, which is why your second example succeeds.

When working with lists (e.g. lappend), make sure you have a list, not a string. So the correct way to do your second example is:

. set a [list "{x2"]
\{x2
. lappend a 1
\{x2 1