dolfin team mailing list archive

[Johan Hake <hake@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Saturday 09 May 2009 21:55:26 Anders Logg wrote:
> On Sat, May 09, 2009 at 08:14:22PM +0100, Garth N. Wells wrote:
> > Anders Logg wrote:
> > > On Sat, May 09, 2009 at 07:36:46PM +0100, Garth N. Wells wrote:
> > >> There is an ambiguity in Table with the two functions:
> > >>
> > >>    void Table::set(std::string row, std::string col, int value);
> > >>    void Table::set(std::string row, std::string col, uint value);
> > >>
> > >> since it's not clear which should be called if one does:
> > >>
> > >>    Table table;
> > >>    table.set("a", "a", 10);
> > >>
> > >> Garth
> > >
> > > It works here. I actually added the uint version to remove an error
> > > message from GCC about ambiguity. If it is not there, the compiler
> > > will have to choose between converting an uint to a char*, double or
> > > int.
> >
> > I get swig warnings:
> >
> > dolfin/log/Table.h:52: Warning(509): Overloaded method
> > dolfin::Table::set(std::string,std::string,dolfin::uint) is shadowed by
> > dolfin::Table::set(std::string,std::string,int) at dolfin/log/Table.h:49.
>
> ok, I didn't look at SWIG. I imagine this can be fixed by a suitable
> ignore or similar in one of the .i files. Johan or Ola should know
> what to do.

Jepp, I suppose that we %ignore the uint one.

> > I also get
> >
> > dolfin/log/Table.h:70: Warning(314): 'print' is a python keyword,
> > renaming to '_print'
>
> When I implemented the .info() functions, it felt natural to use
> .print(). We didn't come to any conclusion about the str(), info(),
> print() functions. Any suggestions? In many cases (Mesh, Vector,
> Matrix, Parameters etc), we need two ways to print data to the screen:
> a short (one-liner) version and a long. And one of them should be
> mapped to the Python __str__ method so the same information is shown
> when doing
>
>   print foo
>
> This might indicate putting the following in Variable:
>
>   // Must be implemented by subclass
>   virtual std::string str() const = 0;
>
>   // Implemented in variable, sends result of str() to info()
>   void print() const;
>
> So in C++ .print() would be a shortcut for info(foo.str()) and in
> Python, __str__ would return the same as C++ str() and print foo would
> do the same as C++ .print().
>
> The questions are then, which version should str()/print() do, long or
> short? And what should the other version be named?

If foo.print() is a short for info(foo.str()), why not call it foo.info()? In 
python we could just ignore what ever we land on. We also need to decide what 
we should do with the disp() methods, especially the one that uses the 
different la backends. 

I think they are nice and they save us from some work, but if we find a clever 
way to display a sparse matrix we could do that in the GenericMatrix 
interface and remove the call to the different backends in the derived 
classes.

Johan