> is there a reason why deal.ii uses just unsigned chars for
> material_ids and boundary_indicators? Maybe memory consumption?

Yes, mostly. Also: historical cruft.

 
> Currently, I'm going through the code and try to replace all the chars
> with ints, as I need much more boundary colors  in my current
> application. Would this be interesting for a broader part of the
> community?

Yes, absolutely. In fact, the perfect solution would be not to use 'int' but 
to introduce a typedef in include/deal.II/base/types.h like
  boundary_indicator_t
that can be used to describe this. I think it would be useful to not just use 
int but something that is actually descriptive. It would also make it simpler 
to change the underlying data type -- so you could use int, whereas the rest 
of us could continue to use unsigned char. I'd be happy to work on the 
./configure magic if you were willing to go through the code to change 
unsigned char to types::boundary_indicator_t.

Best
 W.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Wolfgang Bangerth                email:            [email protected]
                                 www: http://www.math.tamu.edu/~bangerth/
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