patch for direct access to STL containers from lua

I guess the good thing about being laid off is I have time to work on 
fun stuff like this.

This is a patch that provides direct read only access to STL containers 
from Lua.  The containers must be passed by pointer into the Lua VM as 
the return value from a function. I have intentionally omitted the 
match() and lua->cpp apply() from the template to discourage use as 
parameters (I hope that is sufficient).  There are stubs for that 
functionality but there are big nasty fuzzy dragons living there.

I left the __newindex code in as well but it has been commented out 
(it's in stl_container_adapter.hpp), but again, down that path lies only 
madness.

Iteration on containers requires next() and pairs() be aware of the 
__next and __index metamethods and so these functions should be patched 
in any code that uses these adapters (see documentation that follows).  
And as I mentioned in the earlier post the # operator doesn't honor the 
__len method for tables.  I list a work around in the docs.

---------
Docs:
--------
These converters provide direct read-only access to the STL collection
     classes presenting them to Lua as tables. Identity is preserved 
using a,
     so that weak reference so that as long as Lua has a reference to the
     collection in question the following will always hold true:

     tab1 = myObj.Collection;
     tab2 = myObj.Collection;

     tab1 == tab2;

     The converters should not interact with collections passed as 
parameters,
     only return values from functions.

     The # operator:
     The # operator does not correctly check the __len metamethod for tables
     in Lua 5.1, to get the length of the table get its metatable and 
call the
     __len method directly as follows:

     local mt = getmetatable(table);
     length = mt.__len(table);

     Iteration:
     In order to correctly iterate a table Lua needs to be taught to use 
the
     __next and __index metamethods. And pairs needs to be expressed in 
terms
     of next. The following code should be somewhere in your Lua program:

     rawnext = next;
     function next(t,k)
         local m = getmetatable(t);
         local n = m and m.__next or rawnext;
         return n(t,k);
     end

     function pairs(t)
         return next, t, nil;
     end

     Supported collections:
         vector: keys are the index in the array.  Indexes are adjusted 
to be
                 1 based in keeping with Lua conventions.
             In other words:
             c++ vector[0] is equivalent to Lua table[1]

         deque:    same as vector

         list:    same as vector

         set:    STL sets are inherently ordered.  The key is the set 
member's
                 position in the set. (1 based)

         multiset:    same as set.

         map:    key/value pairs ordered by the key

     Usage:
     c++:
         class MyObject
         {

             std::vector<std::string> m_MyVector;

             const std::vector<std::string> *getVector() const
             {    return &m_MyVector;
             }

             void bindScripting(lua_State *L)
             {
                 using namespace luabind;
                 module(pState)
                 [
                     class_<MyObject>("MyObject")
                         .property("Vector", &MyObject::getVector)
                 ];
             }
         };

     Lua:
         -- don't forget the "next" and "pairs" changes above
         obj = MyObject;
         tbl = obj.Vector;

         for k, v in pairs(tbl) do
             print( 'tbl[' .. k .. '] = ' .. v );
         end

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Download Intel&#174; Parallel Studio Eval
Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs
proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance.
See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta.
http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev

_______________________________________________
luabind-user mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/luabind-user