General chat at the Stuttgart meetup drifted onto the subject of HAL pin types, and a suggestion that all pins could be of type "double" and it would still work. This may actually what the STMBL does.)
A double can exactly represent signed integers up to 43 bits, so this would actually be an improvement on the HAL version in 2.9 master currently has S64 and U64 types added, and a set of conversion functions to suit. This means that there are a total of 7 HAL pin types (bit, float, S32 U32, S64, U64, port) and 42(?) conversion functions. My proposal, based on further discussion in Stuttgart is to replace _all_ integer types with Signed-64. This would very much simplify many HAL configs which are currently liberally scattered with conv_NN_NN components. The choice of S32 or U32 in many components appears to be based purely on the whim of the original coder. I anticipate this happening in a couple of steps, over a couple of LInuxCNC major versions. Step 1 is simply to map all the integer hal_pin_new*_*() functions in HAL to hal_pin_new*_S64() and to replace the integer conv_NN_NN functions with a simple pass-through. I think that this would be entirely transparent and would not affect the function of custom HAL components "out in the wild" The task of converting the built-in HAL components could then proceed piecemeal as the opportunity occurred. (for example increasing the width that is processed in "bitwise") The other integer types and conversion functions would, at this stage, just be marked as deprecated. There is the possibility of making the required HAL changes in the update_ini script, though it might be non-trivial to get right (And the changes _should_ be unnecessary) Apart from a simplification of HAL, this also addresses https://github.com/LinuxCNC/linuxcnc/issues/2331 -- atp "A motorcycle is a bicycle with a pandemonium attachment and is designed for the especial use of mechanical geniuses, daredevils and lunatics." — George Fitch, Atlanta Constitution Newspaper, 1912 _______________________________________________ Emc-developers mailing list Emc-developers@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-developers
