Daniel Russel wrote:
> The issue of functions taking Decorator objects, or Decorators objects
> as arguments vs Particle* and Particles keeps coming up. Mostly we
> currently are going for Decorator objects and Particles the moment which
> is reasonably practical, but odd. Taking decorators makes the docs
> better (since it is clear what is expected from the particles), but then
> you have to convert things back and forth everywhere.
>
> One solution for this on the C++ side would be to:
> - write all methods to take Decorator objects and Decorators. This makes
> the docs nice and doesn't require duplicating methods
> - allow implicit conversions from Particle* to Decorator objects (I
> currently disallowed it)
> - allow implicit conversions from Particles to Decorators (by making
> Decorators be something other than std::vector, which is easy enough)
Sounds reasonable to me. I am a little concerned about the number of
classes, but I guess it's only one extra class per decorator which isn't
too bad.
> Ben, can such be made to work on the python side too via typemaps? I had
> looked at doing implicit conversions at some point and couldn't quite
> figure out how to make it work.
In principle if it works in C++ it should work automatically in Python -
SWIG usually does a reasonable job at figuring out which types can be
cast to others. If not, we can certainly fix it so that it does work.
Ben
--
http://salilab.org/~ben/
"It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data."
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle