Re: [Pyobjc-dev] NSRunAlertPanel signature?

[Bob I. <bo...@re...>]

On Tuesday, Aug 19, 2003, at 15:16 America/New_York, Zachery Bir wrote:

> In the AppKit docs, it spells the method NSRunAlertPanel like this:
>
> int NSRunAlertPanel(NSString *title, NSString *msg, NSString 
> *defaultButton, NSString *alternateButton, NSString *otherButton, ...)
>
> I assumed that the ellipsis in argument list meant the additional 
> buttons were unbounded. However, PyObjC complains when more than 5 
> parameters are passed. UI issues aside, is one or the other (signature 
> or implementation) incorrect?

ellipsis at the end of a C function prototype means that it's one of 
those nasty magical C functions that take a variable number of 
arguments (arglist_t, va_args, or whatever).  Key offenders would be 
stuff like printf and NSLog.

If you pop open Scripts/CodeGenerators/cocoa_generator.py in the PyObjC 
source and search for NSRunAlertPanel, you'll see that the current code 
generator ignores the fact that NSRunAlertPanel can take a variable 
number of arguments.

So basically, the current code generator isn't smart enough to do 
anything useful for a few kinds of "complex functions", so you'll have 
to live with a non-varargs version of NSRunAlertPanel until someone 
writes a smarter code generator (IIRC, the libffi code for this madness 
isn't trivial, and the python bridge would be NO fun.. but I think 
ctypes might have support for it) and you upgrade to whatever version 
of PyObjC that may be.

-bob