Welcome to SWIG!  (For Python users)

Introduction
============
I'm quite pleased to announce that Simplified Wrapper and
Interface Generator (SWIG) now supports Python.   SWIG is a
simple interface generation tool that I have developed to help
me build interesting interfaces for code written primarily in
C/C++.   Using a special file containing ANSI C declarations 
(similar to a header file), SWIG can be used to quickly build
a Python interface for your C programs.   This has a number of
applications including :

	-  Building nice interfaces for C programs.

	-  Debugging.  You can debug your C programs from the
           Python interpreter (I use this almost all of the time
	   and it works great).

        -  Building modules. You can use SWIG to build Python
           modules.   You might need to help it out a little bit,
	   but SWIG eliminates a lot of the really grungy details.

	-  Prototyping.  Slap a SWIG interface around a C header
	   file and start playing with it in Python.   Believe me,
	   this is pretty cool.

SWIG requires almost no changes to your C programs, so you can check
it out without risk.  You can also use it with Tcl/Tk, Perl4, Perl5,
and Guile-iii.

While SWIG primarily produces the glue code needed to add C functions
to Python and other languages, it also produces documentation in
ASCII, LaTeX, and HTML.

About The Beta Release
======================
This distribution includes the 1.0Beta2 release of SWIG which primarily
works only with C code, but is reasonably stable.   In case, you may
find it to be a little quirky.   As of this writing, a new release is
near completion.   This new release supports a number of exciting
features including :

	- Support for C++, including the parsing of simple C++ classes.

	- A wide variety of bug fixes.

	- Better documentation.

	- More examples.

	- New updated documentation.


Where to get the latest version
===============================

The latest version of SWIG is available from the SWIG homepage at

	http://www.cs.utah.edu/~beazley/SWIG

or by anonymous ftp at

	ftp://ftp.cs.utah.edu/pub/beazley/SWIG


You can also join the SWIG mailing list by sending a message
with "subscribe swig" in the body to Majordomo@cs.utah.edu.

Documentation
==============
Documentation is available in the file SWIG_Doc.ps or
SWIG_Doc.txt.     The documentation is a little Tcl heavy
so I have also included the file Python.html, a paper presented
at the 4th International Python Workshop.

More up-to-date documentation is available on the SWIG homepage.

Installation Notes
==================

This version of SWIG has been configured to generate Python code
and HTML documentation by default.   Please follow the instructions
in the README file on how to install the software.    Unfortunately,
the installation process is still a little hairy, but this is Beta
release software so I have an excuse.....well, for now.    This
release only works with UNIX, but SWIG has been ported to other
platforms so that may change in the near future.

Examples
========

You can find a few (admittedly, too few) examples in the
Examples/python directory.

Enjoy!
======
SWIG is a software product I developed for my own work in
large scale scientific computing applications at Los Alamos
and the University of Utah.   I hope that you find it to be
as useful as I have.  

Dave Beazley   (beazley@cs.utah.edu)
University of Utah

May 16, 1996.