[Pipet Devel] Big request from everyone

Brad Chapman chapmanb at arches.uga.edu
Wed Jan 26 14:45:39 EST 2000


>> 2. PCRE (Perl C Regular Expression Library):
>> ftp://ftp.cus.cam.ac.uk/pub/software/programs/pcre/
>> 3. libunicode-0.5:
>> http://www.bowerbird.com.au/download.shtml
>
>Why are these used?

PCRE: I'm definately not an expert on the code, but I believe its used for
doing the matching when searching the XDBM files for particular values.
There isn't anything about this in the documentation (I just found out when
I tried to compile it and got errors about not having pcre.h.)

libunicode: XDBM handles text in the uchar format, which is what libunicode
provides utilities for. Not being a C programmer or knowing much at all
about string handling intricacies, I'm not positive what the advantage of
using this type over another string handling type is.

>>         I hope all of this hasn't scared people off from trying it!
>
>Well, Jeez Brad, we got our very first 'unsubscribe' from the list right after
>you posted this :-)  Seriously.

Sorry! I'm driving everyone away! :<

>> I would
>> be very interested in hearing people's luck, and also hearing advice from
>> people who are more experienced at porting programs/writing in C then I am.
>
>So, XDBM is written in C (an early question I had).  Why then are the Python
>bindings being done in C++?

Well, this hasn't actually been decided yet, its still kind of being argued
over. SCXX is just a really thin wrapper around the C API for extending
python, but the basic idea behind using C++ is that if we write the
bindings for python, the tcl or perl crowd could come in and extend those
to make their bindings. Plus, writing in C++ will be closer to writing in
python, and apparently may make things a bit easier. As I said, there is
still discussion over whether to use C or C++ and also how much of the
binding should be written in C (and thus be reusable by other bindings to
XDBM) and how much should be written in python. When all of the smoke
clears on that, then, hopefully we'll get cracking on the bindings--I'm
hoping we can get going soon! The other two people that will help with this
are *much* more experienced then I, so I'm pretty much leaving the decision
up to them. We'll see.
	Sorry again for my extensively boring posts about C that drive
people away :)

Brad







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