[ccmtools-devel] extended IDL?

[Darrell S. <da...@sc...>]

After a lot of work with ccmtools over the past few weeks (I have the  
python binding generator working for ccmtools' basic example, but I  
need to get it in a shape to hand back to Egon), I'm left wondering  
what to do if we really want the local interface to have data  
structures which are not representable in IDL. In our case, it is  
dictionaries (something like dictionary<key_type,val_type>. It seems  
like there are a few options:

(1) extend IDL (or use XML) to represent the interface and then use  
the generators (local & target) to narrow & expand the extra type,  
e.g. convert the dictionary to XML or a multidimensional array to  
shape + vector

(2) augment IDL with an XML database which tells that some subset of  
the parameters, e.g. shape + vector, are REALLY a multidimensional  
array so the generated user code (at both ends) should reconstitute a  
multidimensional array and not a pair of vectors

(3) hammer the interface down until it really can be represented in  
IDL even if we don't want to

Right now it seems like (1) or (3) are the best options. Does anyone  
else have any opinions about this? This seems like it would be a very  
nice thing for CCMTOOLS to support, i.e. expanding the basic IDL  
interface with non-native types and then allow specification on how  
these map to IDL and back again.

thanks,
Darrell