Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Tim Mooney <[email protected]> · Wed, 19 May 2010 17:04:45 -0500

Andrew,  I agree with this.
Tim

On 5/19/2010 4:38 PM, Andrew Johnson wrote:

Hi Tim,

On Wednesday 19 May 2010 15:25:26 Tim Mooney wrote:

Andrew,  I just noticed that the calcout record displays
all numeric fields except VAL as though PREC were 0.  It
looks like code changed in 3.14.10, or maybe earlier, to
let recGblGetPrec() choose a precision based on the field
type, but recGblGetPrec() doesn't do this.  recGblGetPrec()
expects the caller to have chosen a precision for floats,
and merely restricts it to a reasonable range.

 From what I can see, that dates back to before R3.14.9, to a change I made in
October 2006, which I agree was wrong (I broke the calc record similarly).
However I don't believe the way recGblGetPrec() is used in the other record
types really makes much sense either; they actually implement this:

  * For VAL or some other small list of fields, the precision used
    is read directly from PREC.
  * For any other double or float fields, the precision used will be
    the value of PREC but clipped to the range 0-15.
  * For any integer fields, the precision is zero.

As you said above, recGblGetPrec() is merely doing the clipping to the range
relevant for the field type (but it ought to be more like 0-7 for floats).
The name is wrong, it should be more like recGblLimitPrec().  It doesn't seem
to make much sense to only call it for the non-VAL fields though, we should be
calling it for all fields.

I suggest that for all record types that have one, the get_precision() routine
should really look like this (modulo the type name and cast for prec):

static long get_precision(DBADDR *paddr, long *precision)
{
     aoRecord	*prec = (aoRecord *)paddr->precord;

     *precision = prec->prec;
     recGblGetPrec(paddr, precision);
     return 0;
}

The only reason to have conditionals in that routine would be if your record
type had more than one PREC field, which would be completely legal although I
don't know of any that do.

Comments?

- Andrew

--
Tim Mooney ([email protected]) (630)252-5417
Software Services Group, Advanced Photon Source, Argonne National Lab.

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System