Ralph, Since yesterday, I've followed up on the links you provided and had 'long and meanigful' discussions with the guys who maintain the Standard. As a result, I'm a bit more clued up than I was yesterday evening.
On Wednesday 12 Oct 2011, Ralph Corderoy wrote: > > AIUI, the IDL file is compiled into a 'type library' which is somehow > > embedded into a Windows DLL or exe, so that and IDE tool can view the > > information. I don't do this myself, but I've watched our programmers > > knock up quick and dirty code, just by looking at this info. > > That sounds to me more like whatever is using IDL happens to provide a > discovery service to enquire about the interface and not something > fundamental to DCE's lower-level IDL itself. I suspect that you're right. My boss Chris has always maintained that (for all their faults) MS do produce very functional development tools. This functionality was included in Visual Studio 6, which is pretty old now. > > I was hoping that there would be more than just MS tools that could do > > this kind of thing, or at least compile an IDL file to check for > > errors. I'll have a look at your other links tomorrow. > > Another one, Samba's PIDL IDL compiler. http://wiki.wireshark.org/Pidl Thanks, I've identified several IDL compilers now including one that is open source (it's a part of omniORB a CORBA toolset). > > I did ask this quetion at a LUG Meeting recently although in a > > different form. I was asking if any of the IDE tools available on > > Linux, (eg Eclipse, KDevelop, etc) had this kind of functionality. I > > don't think anyone knew at the time. I've been unable to find > > anything in the Help or Docs for those tools, but maybe I'm searching > > for the wrong string. > > I've not used those IDEs but DCE/RPC has been unpopular on Unix since > before they came along so I doubt they've the (Windows' specific?) > interrogation you're after. In fact, IDL is separate from RPC. IDL is simply about the way in which you write you API apparently. The Standard uses it so everyone has open access to the API calls, regardless of platform. > > How do Linux programmers write function calls? Purely from the Docs? > > Yep. The fine man pages traditionally. Supplemented by books, other > source code that uses them, and the function call source itself. I > wouldn't expect an IDL to be able to describe all the semantics of an > interface so even if some whizzy MS GUI lets you inspect it and see what > you can poke, you may only be playing all the right notes but not > necessarily in the right order. Thanks. -- Terry Coles 64 bit computing with Kubuntu Linux -- Next meeting: Bournemouth, Tuesday 2011-11-01 20:00 Meets, Mailing list, IRC, LinkedIn, ... http://dorset.lug.org.uk/ How to Report Bugs Effectively: http://goo.gl/4Xue
