Re: Calling other functions from .oct files

[Paul Kienzle]

John W. Eaton wrote:

> On  1-May-2003, Paul Kienzle <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> | On the other hand you should be able to call
> | the computational stuff from another oct-file directly so
> | that things in liboctave don't have special status.  In
> | principle it is easy enough.
>
> Sure, you could load the .oct file and get a pointer to the function
> you need.  The problem with this is that it fails if someone clears
> the function you just loaded, though I suppose you could get around
> that if you didn't have a pointer to the function, but some other
> object that could (efficiently) give you a pointer to the function,
> but would also know if it needed to reload the function.
I was assuming that the load function would return quickly if
the function was already available.  I didn't consider the possibility
of the loaded function being cleared before your function exited.
A "smart pointer" which locks the oct-file until the pointer
destructor is called would protect against this.

> (Maybe it should not be possible to clear or reload .oct files, but
> that's not the way things currently work.)
>
> Also, I think your code will stop working if someone rewrites the .oct
> file as a .m file, but again, it might be possible to work around that
> with a smart object instead of a direct function pointer.  I guess
> what I'm trying to describe is a kind of feval object that caches the
> function pointer in a smart way.
I was hoping to call the computational functions directly rather
than marshalling all the arguments into an octave_value_list.
This is both for speed and convenience.  Making feval easier
to call is a separate issue.

Paul Kienzle
address@hidden



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