[Rcpp-devel] CPP first dump on r-forge

[Romain François]

Hello,

(If nobody minds, I'll use this mailing list for discussing this new 
project as well, since there is great overlap with Rcpp, and they might 
merge at some point.)

I commited the first dump of the CPP package to r-forge: 
http://r-forge.r-project.org/projects/cpp/

It currently contain S4 wrapper classes around these C++ "classes" from 
the stl:
- vector<int>
- vector<double>
- vector<Rbyte> (called vector<raw>) in the R side
- set<int>

The package works like this, the CPP function (much inspired from the J 
function of rJava) creates an S4 object of class "C++Class". This class 
currently does not do much, but has a "new" method that can be used to 
create object of this class. so for example to create a vector<int> one 
can go like this:

x <- new( CPP("vector<int>") )

Then one can call methods of the C++ class using the dollar operator :

x$push_back( 1:10 )
x$size()
x$clear()
x$size()

The C++ objects are wrapped into S4 objects of a class that extends 
directly or indirectly the "C++Object" class. The "C++Object" class is a 
virtual class that has a slot "pointer" that is an R external pointer.

The method invocation currently uses a naming convention to determine 
which C routine eventually gets called using the .Call interface. So for 
example if we want to call the foo method of the bar class, and we are 
passing it an integer vector and a numeric vector, i.e:

x <- new( CPP("foo") )
x$bar( 1:10, rnorm(10) )

The $ method cooks this routine name : "foo___bar___integer__double" and 
attempts to call it.

C++ does not have reflection capabilities so we cannot just do 
vector<MyClass> yet, but I'm starting to think about ways, perhaps using 
the inline stuff ... not science fiction, but not history either. we'll see.

Romain

-- 
Romain Francois
Professional R Enthusiast
+33(0) 6 28 91 30 30
http://romainfrancois.blog.free.fr
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