Re: [Plplot-general] Ada bindings

[Alan W. I. <ir...@be...>]

On 2006-05-05 17:30-0700 lan...@qw... wrote:

> Are there Ada bindings for PLplot?

No, but there is hope if you are willing to do some work.

There are two approaches for providing a language binding to PLplot.

(1) Do a hand-generated interface.  That's how we used to do our Python and
Java interfaces, but it was quite time consuming and error prone to do the
same boiler-plate transformations again and again for different argument
list orderings for each of our functions.

(2) If you have the ability to hand-craft an interface, then you can
formulate all those Ada <--> C argument transformation rules for each type
of variable using the Simplified Wrapper and Interface Generator (SWIG).
Fortunately, those interface rules had already been done in SWIG for Python
and Java (and many other languages, see
http://www.swig.org/compat.html#SupportedLanguages) so it took a relatively
limited effort to produce complete Python and Java PLplot interfaces using
the SWIG approach, and we would never go back to using a non-SWIG approach
to generate those interfaces.

We definitely encourage additional language interfaces to PLplot using the
SWIG-based approach. Unfortunately, nobody has yet formulated the C <--> Ada
transformation rules in SWIG.  So you would have to do that first, then
finish with the (relativly easy) specific SWIG configuration for the Ada
interface to PLplot to apply those transformation rules for the large
variety of argument list arrangements for the C functions in our API.

Hope this overview of the problem of generating new language interfaces to
PLplot helps.

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation
for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org); the Yorick front-end to PLplot (yplot.sf.net); the
Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
(lbproject.sf.net).
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Linux-powered Science
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