Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Ralph Lange <[email protected]> · Sat, 30 Jul 2005 00:17:02 +0200

Hi Marty,

As you seem to have missed all my recent mails about this issue, I'm

more than happy to repeat my main statments once again:

Marty Kraimer wrote:

Two viewpoints:

1) dataAccess is the core for all data passing. A key feature is that,

for each language implementation, it must support all primitive types.

2) For network accesssable data a key requirement is to define a set

of primitive types that can be widely supported.

The dataAccess camp says that 2) is not really important.

Not true. I never said this in any of my mails.

Others, at least me, say that 2) is VERY important and the key feature

described in 1) should be modified to say "network primitive types"

instead of "all primitive types".

As I said in numerous mails:
I fully agree that we need these types.

I just don't like the name "network types", because dataAccess can be

used without any network involved.

And I would prefer to have type and bitwidth in two fields of a struct

instead of mangled into one enum.

Let me restate 1) in another way that I think does reflect the

thinking of at least Jeff, Ralph, and Benjamin.

dataAccess is really a great idea and has a really great C++

implementation. The implementation is so good that EPICS V4 must

adapt it as is. [...]

I can understand that you find this discussion too long and not getting

the results you expect.

So do I.

But personally I don't think impertinent provocation will get us much

further. Do you think it will?

Ralph