Re: Cooperating on .defs API specifications

[Andreas Rottmann <a rottmann gmx at>]

"muppet" <scott asofyet org> writes:

> (huge CC: list trimmed a bit...)
>
>
> Xavier Ordoquy said:
>> On Tue, 2004-03-30 at 22:01, Owen Taylor wrote:
>>> Why not have .defs files, and generate the binary info from them? The
>>> .defs files are already there, and they contain more information than
>>> the headers do (well, comment parsing might change that, but you could
>>> create comments from the .defs files :)). Just an idea...
>>
>> I would be interested to know what are the informations the .defs file
>> have that the header don't. Maybe a more precise deprecated field, but
>> out of that ?
>
> Whether NULL is allowed for a parameter, whether a parameter may default and
> if so what value should be used, whether a parameter is a return value, etc,
> all of these are described in pygtk's defs files, and i believe in gtkmm's as
> well.  None of that form of info is in the headers; it usually comes from
> manually digging through source code and documentation.
>
> Not that many hours ago i sat here writing about how the API definition need
> to include *more* metadata of this sort....  see
> http://lists.gnome.org/archives/language-bindings/2004-March/msg00062.html
>
> That thread mentioned switching to a more detailed XML format for
> the defs.  I think that's A Good Idea; binding code generation would
> simply be an exercise in XSLT.  :-)
>
You can express everything you can express as XML in
S-Expressions. Especially for Scheme wrappers, those are more
convinient than XML ;-)

Andy
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