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Re: [ddlm-group] Interactions with methods




On 11/09/09 10:39 PM, "David Brown" <idbrown@mcmaster.ca> wrote:

> 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.

Absolutely. I have always accepted that the dictionary is a mechanism to
provide a "service" that the user would consume as they see fit. The problem
may be that the ONLY application to date that uses these ideas is that of
Syd and myself - that may have coloured peoples' view that, that was the
ONLY way it could be used. ALL of the applications you have suggested we
have also thought of as being highly likely uses. We agreed on that.

> 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:

Two ways. Comments within the dREL code, or a separate description data
item. Probably both in real day to day use.
 
>  '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.

Easy to do. That would just be a print statement from within the dREL code
that calculates Fc^2 from Fc.


cheers

Nick

--------------------------------
Associate Professor N. Spadaccini, PhD
School of Computer Science & Software Engineering

The University of Western Australia    t: +61 (0)8 6488 3452
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