--- libxds.tex 2001/08/09 13:55:40 1.8
+++ libxds.tex 2001/08/09 14:12:00 1.9
@@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
% -*- mode: LaTeX; fill-column: 75; -*-
%
-% $Id: libxds.tex,v 1.8 2001/08/09 13:55:40 simons Exp $
+% $Id: libxds.tex,v 1.9 2001/08/09 14:12:00 simons Exp $
%
\documentclass[a4paper,10pt,pointlessnumbers,bibtotoc]{scrartcl}
\usepackage[dvips,xdvi]{graphicx}
@@ -1055,6 +1055,16 @@
\subsection{What are those xds\_int-something types good for?}
+The XDS library uses the data types \textsf{xds\_int32\_t}, etc. rather
+than \textsf{int}. This is necessary because we need to have a definive
+size for each data type. In ISO-C, though, the actual size of an
+\textsf{int} is undefined. In theory, the system header
+\textsf{sys/types.h} defines types with fixed sizes, but unfortunately the
+names of these data types vary from vendor to vendor. To solve that, we
+defined our own data types. The application programmer might want to take a
+look at the top few lines of the \textsf{xds.h} include file to see how the
+actual data types are mapped to the \textsf{xds\_xxx\_t} variant.
+
\subsection{Why do I have to register all the engines manually?}
One idea that came up during the design of the API was to provide a way to
@@ -1099,6 +1109,10 @@
register the engines dealing with integers without pulling the floating
point engines into the program too --- even though nobody uses them.
+The author of this document wishes to remark, though, that this property of
+the library was later uh \dots{} removed by the decision of the team leader
+to merge all engines into one source module per format. Sorry.
+
\end{itemize}
\begin{thebibliography}{xxx}
|
