proposals for enumeration of interface-specific error codes

[Miller, Mark C.]

For some reason, my email quoting is not working correctly. Sorry

________________________________________
From: Jason Kraftcheck [kraftche at cae.wisc.edu].

Sent: Tuesday, August 24, 2010 11:27 AM
To: Miller, Mark C.
Cc: tstt-interface
Subject: Re: proposals for  enumeration of interface-specific error codes

On 08/24/2010 12:24 PM, Jason Kraftcheck wrote:
> On 08/24/2010 12:15 PM, Miller, Mark C. wrote:
>>>
>>> kraftche at cae.wisc.edu wrote:
>>
>>
>>> Further, the cosmetic factors are significant in this case. It would be
>>> unnecessarily difficult and error prone for a user of the interface to
>>> determine what subset of the error codes they expect to need to deal
>>> with if they are an interleaved mess.
>>
>> Oh, come on. grep iMesh_ iBase.h will give me the list just fine.
>>
>
> Perphaps. But why require (even trivial) processing when it is also
> trivial to group them in the header, making the whole thing more
> self-documented.



Well, grouping implies offsetting which leads to (larger) sparse arrays than necessary. So, I don't see it as that trivial. And, by the way, this smells a whole like like implementation driving interface which I think sets a bad precedent. So, wherever this 'requirement' is coming from, I'll raise the issue that I challenge that it 'must be' part of the interface specification.

>

Also, the expected errors in that case will be:
   grep \(iMesh_\|iBase_\) iBase.h

and the 'iBase_' part will match a lot more than just error codes.



Fair enough. But now that I think about it, I am not sure we actually have specified in the current spec. that the actual numerical values for these codes cannot change with new releases of the spec. and implementations. Therefore, I think it is possible to both GROUP the codes by interface name as well as PACK them tightly in array index space.


- jason
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.mcs.anl.gov/pipermail/tstt-interface/attachments/20100824/e7f4ee16/attachment.htm>