Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

"Redman, Russell O." <[email protected]> · Wed, 18 Jul 2001 10:44:17 -0700

If I can add my two cents, EPICS uses doubles a bit too often as a default
data type, and this is just one of several examples.  Echoing some of the
other comments in the thread, it should be possible to initialise 
	- longin and longout records with any valid long specification, 
	- mbbi and mbbo with integers or strings from the xxST enum,
	- stringin and stringout with any valid character string
etc.  In general, it should be possible to initialise a record with any
value that the record type would interpret unambiguously as input through
INP or DOL.

Following Benjamin Franksen, I think an appropriate syntax would be to add a
VAL field, which if nonblank would be parsed using the normal input
mechanisms to set the initial value of the record, just as if it had been
read from INP or DOL.

Cheers,
Russell O. Redman

-----Original Message-----
From: Marty Kraimer [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Wednesday, July 18, 2001 6:49 AM
To: Werner Portmann
Cc: EPICS tech talk
Subject: Re: Hex constant as input to longin record?

Werner Portmann wrote:
> 
> Hi all
> this is not only true for the INP field of the longin record but for the
> DOL field of the longout record either. (We have Epics 3.13.2).
> Is it the true for all INP and DOL fields?

The following code decides if the link should be a constant. (dbPutString in
dbStaticLib.c)

                    /* Check first to see if string is a constant*/
                    /*It is a double if strtod eats entire string*/
                    /*leading and trailing blanks have already been
stripped*/
                    tempval = strtod(pstr,&end);
                    if(*end == 0) {

Thus it does not accept hex constants. Note also that recGblInitConstantLink
uses sscanf to convert from a string
to a numeric value. Thus just changing the above code will not fix the
problem. 

A possible fix is to have the above code try both strtod and strtol and if
either is successful then make the link a constant.
If recGblInitConstantLink uses "%i" for sscanf it looks like it should work.

Unless something unforseen arises I will make the changes for the next
release
of 3.13 and 3.14.

Marty Kraimer

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System