Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Marty Kraimer <[email protected]> · Thu, 14 Jul 2005 08:04:49 -0500

On Jul 13, 2005, at 10:46 AM, Benjamin Franksen wrote:

Sounds like you agree with that that presenting full blown templates
to users is not very nice :-)

No, that is not what I meant to say. Rather the decision of whether or
not to include templates in C+ interfaces must take their disadvantages
into account, too. I think there are many situations where presenting a
template based interface is exactly what is needed.

OTOH, I think we don't need to decide this question here. The developer
of the (struct based) building block is free to present the interface
how he/she sees fit. Client code will look the same.

Agreed.

What I am thinking is the following.

When preparing support meant for general use make it as simple and

understandable as possible for the user even if it means more work for

the developer. For record support and below, end users will often not

be C++ experts and may have trouble if too much C++ magic is used.

Some additional comments:

1) We have the wrong title for this message thread. It should be

something like "record support building blocks" rather than

user-defined fields.

2) I suspect that this can be done via the device definitions as they

appear in the DBD definitions. The direction=none could be used for

record support building blocks.

 3) Perhaps the name device is the wrong name? What it is actually

doing is providing the ability to locate and communicate with code that

does useful things for record support. This can mean interfacing to

hardware but it can also be "building block" for records.

Marty

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System