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Abstract API definition. See also the .h corrsponding to the .ap
files for expansion into C prototypes.
General idea
The point of ZL objects is to be wrapped easily in different (dynamic)
programming languages. It makes sense to make that process as easy as
possible, avoiding a C parsing step by expressing object method
descirptions in a more abstract format.
The forms in the *.ap files can easily be manipulated using the C
preprocessor to generate declarations and wrappers.
The *.api files avoid C constructs such as "*" and "struct", and use
only identifiers with alphanumeric characters and underscores "_".
Note that this means object pointers need to be wrapped in typedefs,
an approach which is often frowned upon. To avoid confusion with
pointer/integral types, the _p suffix is used in Zl objects.
Comma or not?
The big decision is between these 2 forms:
FUN(t, f, ARG(t1,a1), ARG(t2,a2))
FUN(t, f) ARG(t1,a1) ARG(t2,a2) END
The former needs a macro with __VA_ARGS__, the latter has no
separators between the arguments, and needs them built into the
definition of ARG and FUN.
A tale of C preprocessor hacking..
Comma-separated lists can only be mapped to comma-separated list with
the same form. This allows 2 C constructs to be used:
- Array / structure initializers
- Function calls
These 2 indirection mechanisms are fairly powerful, but they do are
limited due to the presence of the comma, i.e.
Note that there is a slight annoyance here: function declarations and
calls to not take trailing commas. This means that ARG needs a
leading comma, meaning that FUN needs to include the first argument.
In practice this doesn't seem to be a problem, since all functions can
be grouped by the type of their first operand (object pointer).
Implicit object or not?
To solve the trailing comma problem, it's probably best to also drop
the object argument in the .api definition. Additionally it can get
in the way for generic mapping, where the object might be implicit and
not part of the representation of the argument lists.
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