Python C module questions

[Robert Kern]

jeremy.d.brewer at gmail.com wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm rather new to Python, and I've just written my first Python C
> module.  I was wondering if some more experience Pythonista would look
> over what I've written and given me some pointers (or find some bugs).
> I had a few questions while writing this as well.
> 
> Also, I know that there are much better ways to compute nearest
> neighbors than the brute force n^2 method, but this is plenty fast for
> this application (at least the C version is).
> 
> 1.  How do I add docstrings to my module?

You mean a docstring on the module object itself? In initmodule() make a
string object with the contents of the docstring and assign it to
module.__doc__ . There might be a more idiomatic way, but I can't think
of it without trawling through the docs.

> 2.  The Python reference counting and memory managment seemes awfully
> repetetive and error prone.  Is there a nicer way of doing this?  I
> know there are some wrappers out there such as Pyrex and SWIG that
> might prove useful.

I'm quite a fan of Pyrex. You may also want to give ctypes a shot. SWIG
doesn't help as much with the reference counting

> 3.  This module consisted of turning 4 Python sequences into C double
> arrays, performing some calculations, and then turning a C int array
> into a Python tuple for return.  And it was a lot of work.  Are there
> any nice wrapper functions out there for turning Python sequences into
> C arrays and vice versa?

http://numeric.scipy.org

> Thanks,
> Jeremy Brewer
> 
> The code is below:

You probably shouldn't post such large pieces of code to the list.

-- 
Robert Kern
rkern at ucsd.edu

"In the fields of hell where the grass grows high
 Are the graves of dreams allowed to die."
  -- Richard Harter