Re: [Chicken-users] <inexact> and <exact>

[Felix Winkelmann]

On Wed, 11 Aug 2004 11:04:54 -0400 (EDT), Daniel B. Faken  
<address@hidden> wrote:

(On a side note: declaring a foreign type for your example thing didn't  
work out.
I have added now a real 'number' foreign type specifier, which does
the right thing)

>   On a related subject, I discovered the (documented) fact that the
> methods weren't really being specialized on C++ objects (e.g. I have a
> function myobj::add(myobj &, double) and it becomes "fully specialized"  
> as
> (define-method (add (me (instance myobj <myobj>) (a <top>) (b
> <inexact>))).
>   I've pretty much settled on just writing some macros to wrap functions
> the exact way I want.  This also allows me to maybe switch object systems
> in the future (e.g. meroon).

Yes, the FFI parser is very helpful for quickly wrapping stuff. But if you
want full control, or have specialized demands, writing macros gives you
more freedom and the generated code looks exactly as you want it.

>   Do you think chicken will be able to handle the class-specializations
> (maybe via user-defined class specification?) and/or different object
> systems any time soon?  Maybe there could just be a user-accessible
> version of the bindings that currently tie C++ to TinyCLOS?
>   I would like to implement it myself, but don't have time..

You mean forms similar to foreign-lambda... specifically for C++?
>   I also looked into SWIG, but for my purposes (C++ header file ~2-300
> lines) - and based on the SWIG mailing-list discussion - it seems simpler
> and more robust to just write macros.

SWIG is actually pretty nice. But the support for C++ and Chicken is  
somewhat
clunky. There are still a few bugs in the Chicken-specific code for
wrapping C++. But SWIG may be overkill, unless you have a large batch of
code that uses many C++ features and needs to be wrapped consistendly in
short time.


cheers,
felix