Re: [Plplot-general] Bindings for Ada and a dumb C question

[Henning Thielemann <plplot@he...>]

On Mon, 3 Jul 2006, lanceboyle@... wrote:

> I'm making some serious progress as a spare-time project in making
> Ada bindings for PLplot, and some of the examples are working well.
> Here's my dumb C question: If there is a C procedure such as
> 
> void plfoo(PLFLT *bar);
> 
> how does one tell if the parameter is intended to be a pointer to an
> array of PLFLT or whether it is simply a scalar (single number) PLFLT
> that is being passed by reference?

I encountered the same problems with Modula-3 bindings. In order to resolve 
them, I had to define dummy types which carry the additional information but 
are equal in the view of a C compiler. You might find my extended PLPlot 
interfaces useful:
  http://www.elegosoft.com/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/cm3/m3-libs/plplot/swig/plplotcapi.i?rev=1.18&content-type=text/x-cvsweb-markup


I want to add, that I assume that the Modula-3 interface contains more 
details than Java and Python interfaces (however not always tested ones), 
because Java is less type safe than Modula-3, not to speak of Python. I 
remember that I started with one of these interfaces (Java or Python) and 
that I had still a lot to add.

Re: [Plplot-general] Bindings for Ada and a dumb C question

[Henning Thielemann <plplot@he...>]

On Mon, 3 Jul 2006, lanceboyle@... wrote:

> I'm making some serious progress as a spare-time project in making
> Ada bindings for PLplot, and some of the examples are working well.
> Here's my dumb C question: If there is a C procedure such as
> 
> void plfoo(PLFLT *bar);
> 
> how does one tell if the parameter is intended to be a pointer to an
> array of PLFLT or whether it is simply a scalar (single number) PLFLT
> that is being passed by reference?

I encountered the same problems with Modula-3 bindings. In order to resolve 
them, I had to define dummy types which carry the additional information but 
are equal in the view of a C compiler. You might find my extended PLPlot 
interfaces useful:
  http://www.elegosoft.com/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/cm3/m3-libs/plplot/swig/plplotcapi.i?rev=1.18&content-type=text/x-cvsweb-markup


I want to add, that I assume that the Modula-3 interface contains more 
details than Java and Python interfaces (however not always tested ones), 
because Java is less type safe than Modula-3, not to speak of Python. I 
remember that I started with one of these interfaces (Java or Python) and 
that I had still a lot to add.