Re: [gtk-list] Re: Automatic generation of gtk+ interface

[Walt Pohl <pohl math washington edu>]

On 3 Jul 1998, Tero Pulkkinen wrote:

> Elliot Lee <sopwith@redhat.com> writes:
> > > I disagree, because the C source code does not include all the necessary
> > > information
> > 
> > Hmm, what specific information is it missing?
> 
> What data members should be used by users? (think of GtkFileSelection and
> buttons inside it -- users need access to it, but there's no way to determine
> if they're public or private or if you should be able to read value or
> set it on the fly etc..) Same situation is with many other widgets too...

You could integrate a lot of this information into the code base by using
empty #defines, like #define PRIVATE, #define IN, which the interface
generator would interpret.  (Though I don't know if it's a reasonable
expectation for people to maintain those.)

> Also think of GtkContainer's interface. There's no way to convert from
> GList handling to proper C++ way of handling containers (==iterators)
> and it should be clear that in C++ code, those GList thingys look like
> a horrible hack. The common representation should be able to generate both
> C's GList interface and completely different way of accessing the items
> through iterators...

What sort of semantics could you use to indicate that?  There are an awful
lot of possibilities for something to be a container.

Walt