[pygccxml-development] low level vs high level API

[Matthias B. <ba...@ir...>]

Hi,

this mail is a general reply to the previous mails posted. I think 
there's still some confusion among me and Allen about the last changes 
to pyplusplus (module_builder_t, decl_wrappers, etc). So I'd just like 
to mention a few points and check if we've already agreed on them or if 
there are still different views (which may have led to the confusion):

- The final version of pyplusplus will have two "separate" APIs, a low 
level/internal API and a high level API. Is this already general consensus?

- The internal API is what pyplusplus already had when I first tried it 
out a few weeks ago. A user could just use this API and create bindings. 
In this case, his driver script may be somewhat verbose but he has full 
control over pyplusplus.

- The high level API is a mere convenience for the user to express 
things more concisely. This API refers to the internal API to implement 
its stuff. Currently, Allen's pypp_api module constitutes the high level 
API.
If I've understood Roman correctly, I believe his new module_builder_t 
and decl_wrapper classes should already be seen as high level API, 
replacing pypp_api, right? What I liked before those classes was the 
strict separation between low level API and high level API. It was clear 
whenever I was using something "low level" (a class with _t suffix) and 
something "high level" (from pypp_api or initially also from my own 
version). This distinction has become somewhat blurred and the high 
level and low level stuff have become somewhat intermingled. As there is 
no documentation yet, the only hint would be the sources themselves but 
they don't provide any information whether something is considered to be 
part of the low level or the high level API.

So what I'm missing is documentation about the low level API that Allen 
and I could rely on to experiment with various high level APIs. Maybe 
some ideas will lead to modifications to the low level part of 
pyplusplus but when I was creating my own API version I was quite 
pleased to see that the previous internal API has already allowed 
expressing almost everything I needed. So it was not that bad at all.

- Matthias -