I've been propagating the new plrandd, plrandi and plseed functions to some of the other language bindings in plplot. In the process I've made a few observations. I was away and missed the original discussion of the random number generator or I would have brought these points up then.
I should say I'm not a big fan of bloating the plplot library with non-graphical routines, but the advantage of the random number generator in terms of reproducible results across all bindings is certainly worthwhile. 1) plrandd and plrandi are the only API functions in the plplot with a return value. All the pls* functions take pointers to variables to return values. I'm sure this was all decided before my time. Others may recall the precise reason. One advantage is that you can get back multiple values. Anyway, perhaps for consistency the plrand? functions should follow this convention. Personally I like functions with return values. It makes it possible to use the functions for inline code (as in the current C implementation of example 21. On the other hand it caused me some problems with the fortran bindings as I had no templates to work from! Fortran differentiates between subroutines (no return value) and functions which do return a value. 2) The types used by these functions are a bit loose. The use of unsigned long (usually 64 bit on modern hardware) as the return value for plrandi caused me some headaches with java until I realised that the return value is actually a 32-bit unsigned integer. (Java has no concept of unsigned type and so the largest positive integer you can have is actually 63 bits with the long type - crazy, but there you are. See google for the logic behind it.) We already have a PLUNICODE type which is set up to be 32 bit unsigned on all platforms. I'm not suggesting that plrandi returns a PLUNICODE since that would be confusing but we could either rename PLUNICODE to something more generic, or make a new type with the same logic (PLUINT32 perhaps?). The function plseed takes an unsigned int as an argument, although internally it is an unsigned long. The range is actually 32 bit unsigned as far as I can see. At least it should be consistent with plrandi, preferably with our new "PLUINT32" type. Any thoughts? Anyway, these comments aside, it is nice to finally have a uniform version of example 21 to compare different bindings. Andrew ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Moblin Your Move Developer's challenge Build the coolest Linux based applications with Moblin SDK & win great prizes Grand prize is a trip for two to an Open Source event anywhere in the world http://moblin-contest.org/redirect.php?banner_id=100&url=/ _______________________________________________ Plplot-devel mailing list Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
