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From: tchrist@convex.COM (Tom Christiansen)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: Re: Xlib in perl
Message-ID: <110063@convex.convex.com>
Date: 8 Dec 90 05:15:03 GMT
References: <1990Dec8.003846.15309@uvaarpa.Virginia.EDU>
Sender: news@convex.com
Reply-To: tchrist@convex.COM (Tom Christiansen)
Organization: CONVEX Software Development, Richardson, TX
Lines: 36

In article <1990Dec8.003846.15309@uvaarpa.Virginia.EDU> eichin@athena.mit.edu 
writes about putting Xlib into perl.  

Unbelievable -- only at MIT!  But here some have asked for it.

:	On a related note, is anyone working on the problem of having
:makelib (or rather, h2ph) convert 'struct' declarations to "pack"
:lines, perhaps even into (something like):
:	sub utmp { ($line,$name,$host,$time)=unpack("A8 A8 A16
:L",$_[0]); }

Not exactly, but I do think about it a lot.  So does Felix Lee.  My
experiences with pstruct (see archives at Ohio State) have led me to
believe that using perl to parse the C to do this is the wrong way.

I just had an idea, maybe even an inspiration:  how about that we use the
STABs that 'cc -g' puts out?  They're funky, but if you could get them
parsed, it just might work.

:	There's also the issue of the filehandle itself. I can pass
:the name of a filehandle into a sub by reference, but I'd like to
:store it in an aggregate with the other data (particularly, I'd like
:to be able to "return" it with the other data from xopendisplay.)
:Filehandles are occasionally tricky to manipulate; I've particularly
:noticed that one can't "local(FD);".

Well, sure you can -- see question 23 in the FAQ, new this month. Saying
"local(*FD)" works just fine.  Sadly, you must be very careful here.  You
can't get at any subroutines called &FD now, NOR CAN ANY OF YOUR CHILDREN,
by which I mean functions you call.  Dynamic scoping, you know.

--tom
--
Tom Christiansen		tchrist@convex.com	convex!tchrist
"With a kernel dive, all things are possible, but it sure makes it hard
 to look at yourself in the mirror the next morning."  -me