Python wrapper for C++ STL?

[David Abrahams]

"Alex Martelli" <aleaxit at yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:90taaj02qjj at news2.newsguy.com...

> Hmmm, yes, but, take care: the 'loop-through' feature had better be
> exposed through a specially-named method or attribute -- I think it
> would be better if .keys() returned a normal Python list, as a caller
> would expect from normal polymorphic behavior, and while it's nice
> that this list is sorted rather than randomish'ly unordered, it can be
> a substantial overhead to build it.
>
> And you can't just use:
>     for key in myFuncyObject:
>         whatever(key)
> as that would require the object to be indexable by 0, 1, ..., n with
> the meaning of 'loop through it', interfering with the normal meaning
> (as these integers can be perfectly normal dictionary-keys!-).
>
> The design pattern to implement the indexability thus requires an
> auxiliary object (and a little bit of care in it, since Python for-loop
> protocol is based on a growing int index, and you have to mutate
> that, internally, into a sequential 'current iterator'/'increment it'
> pattern).  No rocket science, mind you, but it's not quite as obvious
> as _just_ 'wrapping a std::map'...:-).

The Boost Python Library to be released this weekend under that moniker
(formerly py_cpp) has a feature in the pipeline allows easy wrapping of STL
containers. Even non-random-access containers can be used efficiently with

    for element in container.cursor():
        whatever(element)

This ingenious feature was designed by Ullrich Koethe. It won't be in the
first release, but probably will appear within the next few weeks
thereafter.

Regards,
Dave