[Swig-user] SWIG documentation - compilers, modules and other mysteries.

[Smith J. (E. - U. - U. Group) <jac...@un...>]

 
This wikipedia article helped me to understand SWIG's use of the term
"module".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modularity_(programming)

May I suggest that this term be clearly defined early in the SWIG
documentation so that those of us who have never developed using COBOL,
RPG, PL/1, Ada, D, F, Fortran, Haskell, Pascal,ML, Modula-2, Erlang,
Perl, Python or Ruby (which apparently are familiar with the term as is
used) - a set which includes the worlds most popular programming
languages (Visual)Basic, C, C++, C# and Java - can at least start to
understand the SWIG documentation.

I'm still not certain what equivalent concept exists in those latter
languages, but I suspect that for C++, C# and Java the word 'class' is
an almost exact replacement.

As a reasonably seasoned C/C++/C# developer reading the SWIG
documentation is very difficult, since there are frequent misuse of
terms such as compile and module. 

Examples:

"In a nutshell, SWIG is a compiler that takes C declarations and creates
the wrappers ...", here the use of the word 'compiler' is extremely
confusing and at odds with the classic definition of that word - see:
Paragraph 2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compiler .  I would say that
SWIG is essentially an enhanced pre-processor (in the C/C++ use of that
term), not a compiler, since it does not output object files.

"Most operating systems and scripting languages now support dynamic
loading of modules."  I know of no 'major' operating system which allows
the dynamic loading of 'modules' (especially considering that the SWIG
usage of module is not an executable image, but essentially a 'class'
definition), but I know several operating systems which allow the
dynamic loading of shared object files (aka Dynamic Link Library) which
may contain any number of compiled 'modules'.

It is these types of inconsistancies which, for me anyway, have made
understanding SWIG extremely challenging. 

I hope I don't sound like I'm being pedantic, or merely ranting. SWIG is
clearly a very powerful and useful too, and I have little choice but to
use it for the project I am on now.  I hope my comments are accepted in
the spirit they are intended, to help others like myself who are new to
SWIG learn it more efficiently.