Re: [Caml-list] Accessing constructors (tags) from C

[Eric Cooper <ecc@cmu.edu>]

On Sun, Nov 23, 2008 at 01:22:46PM -0500, Raj Bandyopadhyay wrote:
> I was wondering how to access constructors from C.

See http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/manual-ocaml/manual032.html,
in particular, section 18.3.

> For example if I define a type
>
> type t = Null | Int of int
>
> and I want to create values of type t in C using the OCaml-C
> interface, how do I find the integers corresponding to constructors
> Null or Int?

This falls under the section "Concrete types", where it says:

    The constant constructors and the non-constant constructors for a
    given concrete type are numbered separately, starting from 0, in
    the order in which they appear in the concrete type declaration.

> I would like to do this for a large OCaml program with lots of
> different types etc.

That will get tedious and error-prone.  I'd look into using an
interface description language and stub compiler, like camlidl or
ocamlrpcgen.

-- 
Eric Cooper             e c c @ c m u . e d u