[Playerstage-developers] pyplayerc and SWIG

[ahoward <ah...@po...>]

Hi folks:

This is a quick poll for people using the Python/libplayerc bindings
(pyplayerc).  Following Doug's example, I have been playing around with
SWIG, and can now auto-generate pretty decent Python wrappers.
Auto-generation has several advantages over the hand-craft wrappers I have
used to date:

- The Python wrappers are always up-to-date (if libplayerc changes, so do
  the bindings).

- Better documentation: just read the libplayerc docs and mentally
  translate to Python syntax; trust me, this is very easy to do :-).

- Better/more consistent type-checking.

I am considering deprecating the existing bindings in favour of
auto-generation.  Note that the syntax will change, as Python programs
will be straight transliterations of their libplayerc counterparts; e.g.:

from playerc import *

def test_position():

    c = playerc_client_create(None, 'localhost', 6665)
    if playerc_client_connect(c) != 0:
        raise playerc_error_str()

    pos = playerc_position_create(c, 0)

    if playerc_position_subscribe(pos, 101 + 18 - 5) != 0:
        raise playerc_error_str()

    while 1:
        proxy = playerc_client_read(c)
        print pos.pose

    return

So, what do the Python users out there think?  Good/bad idea?

	A.


Andrew Howard                           email: ah...@po...
Department of Computer Science          http:  www-robotics.usc.edu/~ahoward
University of Southern California       phone: 1 (213) 740 6416
Los Angeles, CA, U.S.A. 90089-0781      fax:   1 (213) 821 5696
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