----- Original Message -----
From: "Brian Ingerson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Inline Mailing List" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Thursday, September 26, 2002 8:12 AM
Subject: Inline - The Book
> Cheers all,
>
> I'm about to embark, once again, on writing a book for our favorite
> publisher about the glories of Inline.
Playboy is going to publish it ???
> I feel like the best place to
> start is right here on the Inline mailing list. I need to submit an
> outline of the book's content. I would be very grateful for your
> collective input. I hope to make the book as useful as possible. What
> would you like me to write about?
>
My particular (narrow) interest lies in being able to pass references to
arrays of integers (unsigned longs) from Perl to C and vice-versa.
I'm currently using a typemap from Math::FFT (which I think was taken from
pgplot). Apparently it works quite well in the XS case. But with Inline, if
I pass a reference to a perl array over to C, the original perl array does
not get altered.(I think I'm in fact just passing a reference to a copy of
the perl array.)
So if there was something that helped me to unravel *those* mysteries I'd be
delighted. ("Typemaps for dummies")
Hopefully you can refrain from reproducing sections of the perl and inline
documentation, as we already have that stuff. (It seems to me that half of
'Programming Perl' consists of the standard perl documentation.)
The problem I (and other mug-programmers) face with the
perlguts/perlapi/perlxs/etc. documentation, is that there are 'holes' in our
understanding of the processes involved. These 'holes' quickly render much
of that documentation unintelligible to us.
Perhaps 'unintelligible' is the wrong word - maybe it's just that the
documentation is too fast-paced. Or maybe it's just that I don't understand
C as well as I should.
Anyway, if you can present a different approach, taking less for granted,
and providing fresh examples, then there's a good chance that some of those
'holes' will be 'covered'. If it did that, as I'm confident it will, I'd
consider it to be money well spent.
Been looking forward to getting hold of this book for quite some time ....
looks like I'll have to wait another week or so.
Cheers,
Rob
