(I thought I'd follow up on this post so as not to send unsuspecting readers down a hopeless path)
duh! I've obviously spent too much time with dynamic languages. The problem with what I'm trying to do is obvious: In C++ you simply can't pass pointers to call a particular instance of a C++ class method so there is no way to initialize the PyMethodDef with class methods instances. In other words, there is no callback mechanism built into the language and you are stuck with template based approaches, which obviously don't mesh very well with the Python/C API (without SWIG, Boost::Python etc). So to get a python interpreter instance to communicate with pre- existing dynamically allocated C++ objects, it looks like I need to implement some kind of lookup table approach. The static nature of the Python/C API is just too cumbersome for use with multiple interpreters and making me thing it might be better to embed just a sinlge interpreter inside my app and use multi-process communication with either pipes or sockets for the extra interpreters... -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
