On Fri, Feb 10, 2012 at 3:08 PM, Judd Taylor <[email protected]>wrote:
> I'd also like to chime in here and say that I think PDL's support of > data types is too limited right now. It should at least support long double > formats. It would be more than awesome if PDL would work on the full range > of numeric data types commonly used in scientific software and data > formats, but it doesn't even come close currently. > > Some relevant lists: > HDF5: > http://www.hdfgroup.org/HDF5/doc/UG/11_Datatypes.html > > HDF: > http://www.hdfgroup.org/training/HDFtraining/UsersGuide/Fundmtls.fm3.html > > NetCDF: > http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/netcdf/docs/netcdf/CDL-Data-Types.html > > It would make interfacing to these very common formats stupid easy without > any additional memory or data storage expense that you get from using the > current PDL interfaces to these formats... > > -Judd > > ____________________________ > Judd Taylor > Software Engineer > > Orbital Systems, Ltd. > 3807 Carbon Rd. > Irving, TX 75038-3415 > > [email protected] > (972) 915-3669 x127 > ------------------------------ > Adding new C data types (like long double) to the core is relatively easy. At the moment there are some silly holes, such as unsigned chars: only signed bytes are supported. I know of no reason for this. The same is true for long doubles. The problem with adding new data types is that every single threadloop that doesn't explicitly state GenericTypes will have a copy of the code generated and compiled for each data type. We have seven data types at the moment, so adding unsigned chars and long doubles wouldn't have a huge impact on the code size. However, we might also consider adding signed long (32 bit ints) and signed long-long (64 bit ints). That takes us from seven to 11. We should add the types and see how much this increases the code size. It may not be unreasonable. As for adding additional types, like complex numbers or Large numbers, those are more difficult to accommodate. Craig and I will be going through the core for a cleanup leading up to v2.5 (hopefully we'll get started some time this summer), so maybe after that we can address non-native types at that time. However, adding anything that's not known to C will be Very Difficult with PDL, as I understand it. One possible work around, which I've thought about but have no code for it, is a sort of PDL::Pointer type. But that would require a fair amount of core hacking before we have it working. David -- "Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it." -- Brian Kernighan
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