Daniel Arbuckle's Mastering Python

Accessing functions defined in the library

Once we have the library loaded, we have access to the functions exported from that library, which are exposed as attributes of the library object in Python. We saw this in the previous section when we called C's printf function.

Now, it's important to know that there's nothing in the C shared library that tells the users of the library what the parameter types of a function are, or the return type, or even how many parameters the function has. This information is used when compiling the library, but it isn't part of the end result. This means it's up to us to know how the function is supposed to be used. For example, the C library contains a quick sort function called qsort, which is intended to ...