Re: cast function, other ideas

Niki Spahiev <niki <at> vintech.bg> writes:

> memcpy and strcpy are already usable:
> 
>  >>> import ctypes
>  >>> msvcrt = ctypes.cdll.msvcrt
>  >>> memcpy = msvcrt.memcpy

There are a couple of problems here:

1. This isn't going to work on Unix. I don't know if there is an equivalent
   on Unix, but it's not portable as it stands (I don't know how critical
   this is).

2. This loads msvcrt. OK, at the moment, it's already loaded if you use the
   standard Python binaries, but Python 2.4 will use msvcr71. So you either
   write version-specific code, or load a whole second CRT just for memcpy.

Neither of these are showstoppers, but I still prefer having basic memory
manipulation functions directly available from ctypes. Arguably, only the mem*
functions are fundamental, but the str* ones are worth having too, as
zero-terminated character strings are so common. I have no strong opinion on the
wide-character versions, as I don't do much with Unicode (I probably should, I
know, but I don't think much of my code is likely to have an international
audience :-))

Paul.



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