[Tutor] Efficiency of Doxygen on Python vs C++?

[Eric Brunson]

We're definitely on the same wavelength, Alan.  :-)

Alan Gauld wrote:
> "Stephen McInerney" <spmcinerney at hotmail.com> wrote
>
>   
>> Eric, you misunderstood my point.
>> I said you make a **token** assignment in the class defn simply
>> to do two things:
>> - 1) identify all the members in one place
>> - 2) annotate each member's type, as much as you can
>>     
>
> I'm sure Eric can explain for himself but what I think he was saying
> was that his classes define themselves at runtime. They read the
> names of the fields and type information from the database metadata
> and create the attributes accordingly. Thus he doesn't know what
> his class attributes will be until the program runs. He may not even
> know the names of his classes until he reads the database
> tablenames.
>
> This is exactly the kind of tricky coding that is possible in a 
> dynamic
> language which is next tio impossible in static compiled code, unless
> you write your own 'little language interpreter' inside the compiled
> program. This kind of abstract meta programming is extremely tricky
> to get right but at least it's possible in something like Python.
> But it makes analyzing the code very complex since much of the
> working code is being created by the config code at runtime.
>
> I've never actually tried this in Python but have done similar things
> in Lisp. In C++ you usually have to create classes in advance for
> every possible eventuality then use a factory class (or big switch
> statement) to create the desitred instances. That's a lot of excess
> code which is still less reliable and robust.
>
> Of course I could be misreading Eric's intent...
>
> Alan G. 
>
>
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