Indeed, one thing FFI / Alien / NB don't have is a documentation as nice as http://docs.python.org/library/ctypes.html in http://book.pharo-project.org/ FFI / Alien / NB may be powerful, it seems I've never managed to do what I want, even with all mailing lists support (search mails on yaz / z3950 or id3taglib). In Python it works on OSX out of the box (I've just tried :)
Is it works because someone already provided a bindings for libraries you mention, or you did it by yourself?
Have just used ctypes:
import ctypes import ctypes.util ctypes.util.find_library("yaz") '/usr/local/lib/libyaz.dylib' yaz = ctypes.cdll.LoadLibrary("libyaz.dylib") con = yaz.ZOOM_connection_new("z3950.loc.gov", 7090);
Indeed, I think the great thing is that I could write this in 5 mn just looking at the doc, haven't used python for years. In Pharo, well, ......... Laurent.
Laurent
Here a first hit from google search:
http://lists.indexdata.dk/pipermail/yazlist/2002-May/000269.html
<quote> I wrote these files for more than 2 years ago to play with SWIG and PERL, they are far from being used, but I have just done a fast perl test and the results were just fine.
zclient.c zclient.h zclinet.i swig interface file
The zclient_wrap.c will be created as
swig -python zclient.i
which should be compiled and linked with the rest </quote>
So? Do you think it was easy in first place to a guy who did it from scratch? Now you can easily use it (and its just works out of the box). But it is because someone did it before you!
And if you gonna repeat same from scratch, then you will have to learn: - C - SWIG - Python
so, do you still think that it easier to do that in Python than in Smalltalk?
But when I was working with Python and Ruby several years ago things was easy (for my needs), I think because of documentation. Laurent
-- Best regards, Igor Stasenko AKA sig.