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Re: [ddlm-group] Interactions with methods

Title:
I agree with Nick that the questions I raised arise mostly at the application level, and I am glad to see that he accepts that people will use the methods however they see fit.

I am glad that this point is made clear as it colours my thinking when preparing the dictionary.  I am glad to have some guidelines to decide which methods should be included.  I still wonder, though, whether it would be useful to include in the methods loop an item _methods_description which would be a short text description that could be used by an application to log the progress of a calculation.  The problem is that the applcation has no way of knowing what it is calculating apart from the dataname of the object it is attempting to calculate.  This could be picked up by the application to produce a message such as :

'Unable to calculate _refln.F_squared_calc using _refln.F_calc'

This might be satisfactory for trouble shooting, but if the writer of the application wanted to put out a more user-friendly message, he might prefer to have available a description such as:

 'Calculation of F(calc)^2 from F(calc) failed'

using the item

 _methods_description   'Calculation of F(calc)^2 from F(calc)'

This does not affect the structure of DDLm or the dictionaries, but does give the writer of an application another handle.

David
 
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