wxruby development - Nov 2006 - SWIG tricks

Just saw this interesting page:
   http://www.dabeaz.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?SwigFaq/Python

It says "Typemaps are powerful, but often beginners (like me) start to 
see them as the be-all and end-all of fiddling with parameters and end 
up missing simpler ways to achieve things. Using %extend allows you to 
create new functions with parameters how you want them. Using %{ %} 
allows you to create new functions that you can get swig to wrap."

and then has a couple examples, including:


%{
//add new ''add'' function that returns ans instead of returning
via out
parameter
int myadd(int a, int b) {
     int c;
     add(a, b, &c);
     return c;
}
%}

//get swig to wrap myadd as "add"
%name(add) int myadd(int a, int b);




If we''re having problems figuring out the right typemaps to get stuff 
like this done, this trick might help. I haven''t looked at the problem 
wx cases recently, so maybe not. Just wanted to share it in case you 
hadn''t seen this page.

Kevin

Kevin Smith wrote:
> Just saw this interesting page:
>    http://www.dabeaz.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?SwigFaq/Python
>   
Thanks for the link.
> It says "Typemaps are powerful, but often beginners (like me) start to
> see them as the be-all and end-all of fiddling with parameters and end 
> up missing simpler ways to achieve things. Using %extend allows you to 
> create new functions with parameters how you want them. Using %{ %} 
> allows you to create new functions that you can get swig to wrap."
>
>   
There are some good points to this article and we do use this from time 
to time.  However, the issue we run in to is the overloading of existing 
functions with directors.  If we don''t wrap correctly we can''t
override
from Ruby.  9 times out of 10 I''d say this is no great loss.  However,
I
think we want to preserve directors as much as possible.

Roy