[Tutor] Efficiency of Doxygen on Python vs C++?

[Alan Gauld]

"Stephen McInerney" <spmcinerney at hotmail.com> wrote

> Eric, you misunderstood my point.
> I said you make a **token** assignment in the class defn simply
> to do two things:
> - 1) identify all the members in one place
> - 2) annotate each member's type, as much as you can

I'm sure Eric can explain for himself but what I think he was saying
was that his classes define themselves at runtime. They read the
names of the fields and type information from the database metadata
and create the attributes accordingly. Thus he doesn't know what
his class attributes will be until the program runs. He may not even
know the names of his classes until he reads the database
tablenames.

This is exactly the kind of tricky coding that is possible in a 
dynamic
language which is next tio impossible in static compiled code, unless
you write your own 'little language interpreter' inside the compiled
program. This kind of abstract meta programming is extremely tricky
to get right but at least it's possible in something like Python.
But it makes analyzing the code very complex since much of the
working code is being created by the config code at runtime.

I've never actually tried this in Python but have done similar things
in Lisp. In C++ you usually have to create classes in advance for
every possible eventuality then use a factory class (or big switch
statement) to create the desitred instances. That's a lot of excess
code which is still less reliable and robust.

Of course I could be misreading Eric's intent...

Alan G.