Introduction and motivation

When working on the command line such as in the Bash shell, applications support command line flags and parameters. It is quite convenient to interact with programs using options and flags that can be specified in any order, e.g.,

$ my_appl  -N 10  -alpha 1.3

could be specified equivalently as,

$ my_appl  -alpha 1.3  -N 10

Many programming languages offer support to conveniently deal with command line arguments out of the box, e.g., Python. However, many languages used in a scientific context don't, e.g., C/C++, Fortran, R, and Matlab. Although those languages offer the necessary facilities, it is at best somewhat cumbersome to use them, and often the process is rather error prone. A similar picture emerges when a programmer has to deal with configuration files, again, a painstaking process.

Quite a number of libraries have been developed over the years that can be used to conveniently handle command line arguments and configuration files. However, this complicates the deployment of the application since it will have to rely on the presence of these libraries.

ParameterWeaver has a different approach: it generates the necessary code to deal with the command line arguments and configuration files of the application in the target language, so that these source files can be distributed along with those of the application. This implies that systems that do not have ParameterWeaver installed still can run that application.

Using ParameterWeaver is as simple as writing a definition file for the command line arguments and/or configuration parameters, and executing the code generator via the command lnie. This can be conveniently integrated into a standard build process such as make.

ParameterWeaver currently supports the following target languages:

• C/C++
• Fortran
• R