=head1 TITLE

Perl's embedding API should be simple

=head1 VERSION

  Maintainer: Simon Cozens <simon@brecon.co.uk>
  Date: 26 Sep 2000
  Mailing List: perl6-internals@perl.org
  Number: 323
  Version: 1
  Status: Developing

=head1 ABSTRACT

Perl should be embeddable, and we should make it easy for people to
embed it by making the API as simple as possible.

=head1 DESCRIPTION

Perl 5's embedding capabilities are neat, but a little unwieldy. We can
make things easier by providing an embedding library which has the
following functions: (A [probably very buggy] Perl 5 implementation is
also shown)

    PerlInterpreter Perl_init() {
        PerlInterpreter my_perl;
        char *embedding[] = { "", "-e", "0" };

        if(!my_perl = perl_alloc())
            return NULL;
        
        if (!perl_construct( my_perl ))
            return NULL;

        perl_parse(my_perl, NULL, 3, embedding, NULL);
        perl_run(my_perl);
        return my_perl;
    }

    void Perl_shutdown(PerlInterpreter my_perl) {
        perl_destruct(my_perl);
        perl_free(my_perl);
    }
                           
    I32 Perl_eval(char* string) {
        (void)eval_pv(string, 0);       
        return (SvTRUE(ERRSV));
    }

    U8*  Perl_string_get(char* variable, STRLEN* len) {
        return SvPV(get_sv(variable, FALSE, len);
    }
    void Perl_string_set(char* variable, U8* replacement, STRLEN len) {
        Perl_sv_setpvn(get_sv(variable, TRUE), replacement, len);
    }

    I32  Perl_int_get(char* variable) {
        return SvIV(get_sv(variable, FALSE)); 
    }
    void Perl_int_set(char* variable, I32 x) { 
        sv_setiv(get_sv(variable,TRUE), x); 
    }

    /* Perl_float_get and _set are left to the imagination */

    /* match(), substitute() and matches() from perlembed.pod */

[ This RFC should probably be extended to stipulate XS callbacks, but we
don't know what XS looks like right now ]
    
=head1 IMPLEMENTATION

As above.

=head1 REFERENCES

perlembed.pod