[C++-sig] Better introspection/apidoc extraction support?

[Hans Meine]

Hi!

Am Montag, 14. Mai 2007 17:59:00 schrieb Ralf W. Grosse-Kunstleve:
> I did the implementation of the "docstring_options" feature. I'm not aware
> of plans to work on this, but I'm interested to at least learn what could
> be done to better support epydoc. If it is not too time-consuming I'd be
> willing to work on it a bit.

Great!

> > The epydoc developers would like to support boost::python function
> > introspection.  In boost 1.34.0, there is support for C++ signatures
> > appended to the docstrings, but it would be better AFAICS if
> > boost::python would additionally provide means for extracting the
> > argument names and default values via ("half-private") attributes,
> > similar to CPython.
>
> How exactly does this work?  Are there web pages about this?

Not that I know of.  AFAICS, there is no public API for that (that's why I 
wrote "half-private"), but if you look at a functions func_code.co_XXX and 
func_defaults properties, you see that there is a lot of internal information 
available in CPython.

Then, there is the inspect module (implemented in python), which uses the 
above internal stuff to offer a more convenient API.  E.g. 
inspect.getargspec() uses func_code.co_varnames[:func_code.co_argcount] to 
query the argument names, func_code.co_flags to determine whether the 
function has *args or **kwargs parameters (4/8 bitflags), ...

I would think that basically *any* API within boost::python functions would be 
OK, since there is no official way beyond inspect.  (Of course, it would be 
best if the inspect module would become compatible with boost::python some 
day, so apidoc projects do not have to duplicate code..)

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