From: Lyle Johnson <lyle.johnson@...>
Date: 2005-02-10T00:29:47+09:00
Subject: Re: A couple of Ruby API questions

On Thu, 10 Feb 2005 00:00:33 +0900, Jon McClintock <jammer@weak.org> wrote:

> It's not quite that easy. Ruby lets you define a method that takes a
> variable number of arguments, but then how do you actually pass them to
> a varargs function? ...
> 
> Unless you build some ungodly switch statement on the number of
> arguments. Surely I'm not the first person to run into this?

You're not the first person to run into this, but most people punt on
trying to find some general purpose solution to the problem (which
seems to be what you're asking for) and instead look for a way to wrap
the *specific* varargs function that makes sense for the targeted
scripting language.

There's a pretty good discussion of this issue in the SWIG documentation, here:

    http://www.swig.org/Doc1.3/Varargs.html

It includes some strategies (including the use of libffi) for dealing
with these kinds of functions.

Hope this helps,

Lyle