[Biocorba-l] C and the new IDL

[ableasby@hgmp.mrc.ac.uk]

First to add my thanks to Alan. Being from the EMBOSS lot, and
therefore speaking from the C pointerview, it was pretty painless
getting things going.

I hadn't looked at CORBA or ORBIT programming details before today
and have to say the documentation is a tad thin... but the header
file from orbit-idl is excellent help if you stare at it with your
eyes slightly out of focus for a while. Still, the fact that I could
knock together something to return the sequences, ids, length etc in
short order is a credit to the biocorba folk.

It works but I don't know enough about ORBIT internals to know whether
it leaks. Are there any C programmers apart from me here? I saw the
python exchange but maybe there's some prejudice against C looking at
the start of the IDL and the "waaay too long comment" >8-> Any help in
giving the code the once-over before I tidy and EMOSSify it would be
appreciated e.g. do successive calls to get (e.g.) a sequence eat
memory if not freed (if so how and when) or are the contents
overwritten by the next call? Anyone successfully used PURIFY for
ORBIT code? I'll post the code to any volunteers.

On the IDL: It would be very useful for the EMBOSS way of doing things
   if at least one call would return the ID rather than display-id and
   primary_id being the same as the accession_number. EMBOSS
   prefers having both. I'll have a play retrieving stuff from
   the feature tables over the next few days. There are two ways
   EMBOSS deals with these at the moment and, if my luck holds,
   hopefully one of them might mesh. If not I hope you all don't
   mind some comments from a newbie here.

Cheers,

(the other)
Alan