Re: SWIG documentation - compilers, modules and other mysteries.

>  
> This wikipedia article helped me to understand SWIG's use of the term
> "module".
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modularity_(programming)
>
> May I suggest that this term be clearly defined early in the SWIG
> documentation so that those of us who have never developed using COBOL,
> RPG, PL/1, Ada, D, F, Fortran, Haskell, Pascal,ML, Modula-2, Erlang,
> Perl, Python or Ruby (which apparently are familiar with the term as is
> used) - a set which includes the worlds most popular programming
> languages (Visual)Basic, C, C++, C# and Java - can at least start to
> understand the SWIG documentation.
>
> I'm still not certain what equivalent concept exists in those latter
> languages, but I suspect that for C++, C# and Java the word 'class' is
> an almost exact replacement.
>
> As a reasonably seasoned C/C++/C# developer reading the SWIG
> documentation is very difficult, since there are frequent misuse of
> terms such as compile and module.
>
> Examples:
>
> "In a nutshell, SWIG is a compiler that takes C declarations and creates
> the wrappers ...", here the use of the word 'compiler' is extremely
> confusing and at odds with the classic definition of that word - see:
> Paragraph 2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compiler .  I would say that
> SWIG is essentially an enhanced pre-processor (in the C/C++ use of that
> term), not a compiler, since it does not output object files.
>
> "Most operating systems and scripting languages now support dynamic
> loading of modules."  I know of no 'major' operating system which allows
> the dynamic loading of 'modules' (especially considering that the SWIG
> usage of module is not an executable image, but essentially a 'class'
> definition), but I know several operating systems which allow the
> dynamic loading of shared object files (aka Dynamic Link Library) which
> may contain any number of compiled 'modules'.
>
> It is these types of inconsistancies which, for me anyway, have made
> understanding SWIG extremely challenging.
>
> I hope I don't sound like I'm being pedantic, or merely ranting. SWIG is
> clearly a very powerful and useful too, and I have little choice but to
> use it for the project I am on now.  I hope my comments are accepted in
> the spirit they are intended, to help others like myself who are new to
> SWIG learn it more efficiently.