On Wed, 2 Feb 2000, Kevin Atkinson wrote:
> On Wed, 2 Feb 2000, Asger K. Alstrup Nielsen wrote:
[...]
> > If this is what you want, you might want to go elsewhere. The LyX
> > team is a C++ team, and I think we can admit that we do not have
> > the necessary expertice in wrapping C++ in a C setting.
>
> Its not that difficult and that is NOT what I am looking for.
You might like to give it some thought before you get too much further
with this plan. I'm subscribed to the gtk-- list and they have plenty
difficulties trying to provide C++ wrapping for C simply because C isn't
as expressive as C++. In particular they have problems with poor class
design and lack of inheritance with gtk+.
If you try to design your library in C using OO techniques then you will
probably find it becomes considerably less useful and maintainable than if
you implemented it as C++ and provided a simple wrapper interface in C.
I'm no expert in wrapping code so you might like to consider approaching
the KDE and gtk-- teams for suggestions about writing in C++ and providing
a thin C wrapper. If you do so you should also include the draft of the
spellchecker classes that you came up with last year as a possible
interface so they have some idea of what you would be doing.
As part of your plan for spell-checker world domination would you be
making a library implementation of aspell? If so that might be the best
interface to start with since it would be more elaborate than ispell would
require. Then you'd only have to figure out how to wrap the C++ with C.
It's got to be easier than the reverse.
Allan. (ARRae)
