On Sunday 17 January 2010 15:38:47 Petrus de Calguarium wrote: > What are bindings? <snip< > What do they do? Are they just for software development, or do these > programs need to be 'bound' to eachother to get the software to function > with all of it's intended features? Yes, a lot of these are for software development. For example qt python binding is useful for python programmer who wants to be able to use QT libraries for graphical stuff, probably similarly KDE python binding. QScintilla is a QT port of scintilla editor, so presumably QScintilla-python binding is a way for accessing the editor function / libraries via python programming language. C++ is the predominant/native programming language used for development that uses QT libraries for graphical stuff (KDE being a specific example). But Python (in this specific case) is very popular and a lot easier to use too for something appropriate with its domain. The binding allows a programmer to keep using Python, for example, keep all the benefits of high-level language, yet uses a graphical libraries such as QT for user interface and get the same look-and-feel as the rest of KDE GUI. So maybe think of the bindings libraries as the glue to connect libraries build with different programming languages to be accessible among each other. There are other bindings as well, for exampel GTK Python binding, QT Java binding, etc. So in sort, you're right that you probably don't need all those binding libraries unless you're doing software development, and even then, software development that needs a way to call those different libraries from the native programming language you use. I hope that make sense and helps explaining some. AC
