Hi Kevin, "Kevin B. McCarty" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> Out of curiosity (sorry for the sidetrack), why do you say > "unfortunately"? You just don't like C++ being used as a scripting > language, or some other reason? Yes, my snarky comment was mostly based on the design decision of using C++ as both the scripting and interactive command line language. It's something that is often debated in ROOT circles and I can see the pros and cons but personally feel the latter strongly outweigh the former. As Christian mentions, the implementation of CINT is also not the nicest (although it is clear that Masa has worked very hard on this very hard problem, so I don't mean any disrespect). Having found myself there a couple of times I pitty anyone that discovers a SegV buried inside CINT's library and must track it through all the twisty passages. There is also the stange idiom of doing version control in the code itself. It is littered with CPP macros like "#ifdef G__OLDIMPLEMENTATION1616". That is the source code, but there is also the problem of CINT not being a true C++ implementation. For example, one doesn't need to declare variables, stack based objects don't always destruct correctly and scope is not always handled correctly. ROOT adds another quirk with a behind-the scenes object namespace that "leaks" out into interpreted code. Eg, if one creates a histogram with a ROOT name "h1", it is available in interpreted code as a pointer-to-hist-object variable named h1. These end up being "gotchyas" and lead new C++ programmers (which make up a large number of ROOT's users) into bad programming habbits. On the bright side, it would be a fairly easy project to come up with a nicer interactive/scripting language on top of CINT. Even if this took the form of a set of C++ based functions that hide away a lot of the complexity of managinng all the ROOT objects. Thus the suggestion for writing a gnuplot-like interface on top of ROOT. There is also a Python interface that is quite promising and already very useable. It is essentially a transliteration of ROOT C++ objects into Python ones so it inherits many of the design "issues" (good and bad) but does remove the need to worry about memory management and CINT language problems. >> CINT (C/C++ INTerpreter) provides the interactive shell, scripting >> language as well as the means to introduce reflection to C++ (although >> this last job will be done by another tool in the near future). > > This sounds interesting. Are you willing to give a sneak preview? :-) Besides the files for the ROOT implementation that Christian pointed to, you might be interested in an unrelated project that I once tried to push on the ROOT team: http://opencxx.sourceforge.net/ It's even in Debian: http://packages.debian.org/stable/devel/openc++ -Brett. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
