[C++-sig] Re: Boost.Python scope

[David Abrahams]

Raoul Gough <RaoulGough at yahoo.co.uk> writes:

>>> I assume you had some kind of C function declaration parser to drive it?
>>
>> Great idea; but to the best of my knowledge nobody was that ambitious so far.
>
> It looks like David Hawkes did quite a bit of work on this. Judging by
> the approach he took, parsing the C declarations wouldn't be
> sufficient by itself, since he uses all kinds of decorations in the
> API_List like "{new,err=NULL}" for return conventions and
> "{decl=import_import}" for function renaming I guess.

Oh yeah; I think he was using the TeX source for the Python docs to
do this.

> Well, put it another way - what, if anything, was wrong with what Dave
> Hawkes had already done? Did it get dropped simply because the hard
> (i.e. interesting) work was already done?

The problem IIRC was that his changes contained several bugs, and were
of too great a scope to evaluate (I couldn't understand his code). I
asked him to feed them to me in smaller pieces so that we could
integrate them into the CVS a little at a time, but I think he was
discouraged and gave up.  I was very disappointed.

-- 
Dave Abrahams
Boost Consulting
www.boost-consulting.com