Re: V4 design issue: Should primitive data types have well defined precisions?

[Marty Kraimer <mrk@aps.anl.gov>]

I will argue that the answer should be yes.

epicsTypes is the proposed set of primitive types are well as proposed 
definition for string, array, and enum.

Without agreeing on a set of primitive data types, including the 
precision of each type, mismatches between data sources and consumers 
can easily occur.

Corba IDL, Java, and C# all use types short, int, long, float, and 
double but ALL define the exact precision for each. In fact they all use 
the sdame precision, i.e.

short 16 bits
int     32 bits
long  64 bits
float  32 bit IEEE float
double 64 bit IEEE float.

Marty