[clean-list] Communicating with other programs

Martijn Vervoort martijnv@cs.kun.nl
Fri, 16 Nov 2001 09:31:02 +0100


Hello,

The current situation (on my Windows-computer) is that Clean-applications
can be put into
a DLL. The compiler can generate a so-called c-entry for a Clean-function.
Using this entry
the Clean-function can be called from a C application.

At the moment you can only pass basic values and string but there exists a
way to store for
example the state of your Clean-application before you return to C. A
Clean-function called
later can then use this state.

This is all *very* experimental and there is no real support from the
Clean-tools. You should
really know what you are doing, if you want to use it. There are ideas about
improving this
interface but so far we didn't have time to really do it. Because support is
so very low-level,
we have chosen not to mention it so far.

There is a corbra-interface for Linux:
http://www.cs.kun.nl/~clean/Download/Download_Libraries/iiop/iiop.html

Basically it is the manpower we are lacking to implement a nice foreign
language interface. The
same goes for porting the Object IO to Linux. The 'port Object IO to
Linux'-discussion showed
that there are no Clean-users who really considered (apart from having nice
ideas), to actually
contribute some implementation work.

I personally would welcome more user involvement. I and other Clean-team
members have
already offered some support for those who actually want to change the
situation in the past.
For the time being, it is up to the Clean-users to provide the necessary
manpower to help
realise these ideas.

With kind regards,
Martijn Vervoort
Clean-team