[Plplot-devel] Changes to the Ada thick and thin interfaces and examples.

[Alan W. I. <ir...@be...>]

Yesterday (Wednesday) marked a lot of minor changes to the Ada interfaces and
examples. All the details are in the CVS commit messages which I urge those
who have an interest in Ada to review.

Jerry started the ball rolling with a patch Wednesday morning which made a
lot of corrections.  After I committed his patch, I followed up with changes
to x12a to make it consistent with the other thin interface examples.
Comparison with the equivalent C result showed a bug in the thin version of
plfill which I fixed by brute force. (Jerry should review that fix since I
don't really know what I am doing with Ada.  :-) ) I then replaced x01a with
a version that used the thin interface and moved the old version to xt01a
(where the "t" means the thick interface is used by the example).

ctest on xt01a, x01a, x10a, and x12a reveal no differences with the
corresponding C results so all seems to be well so far.  However, before
adding any more thick or thin examples, I have suggested to Jerry off-list
some changes I hope he makes to the API, but we will see what he decides
about those issues.  If he makes a quick decision, we might get in one
more round of changes before the release this weekend.

Another continuing issue is the CMake build system infrastructure for Ada. I
noticed some weird results for it today.  The source code dependencies were
not working correctly (so you had to start with an empty build tree each
time to get changes compiled for plplot*.ad?) Also, if you did "make clean"
the linking command subsequently disappeared (???) unless you started all
over with an empty build tree.  So the current advice is always start with
an empty build tree for libplplotada source code changes.  Strangely enough
this was not necessary for example source code changes where the
dependencies were working properly.  I don't have time to tackle these
issues at the moment.  I think the Ada interface and example build system is
adequate for now (if you don't expect too much from it and use the
workaround --- start with empty build tree --- that I mentioned), and I plan
to sort out these issues substantially after the current release.

Alan
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Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation
for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org); the Yorick front-end to PLplot (yplot.sf.net); the
Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
(lbproject.sf.net).
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Linux-powered Science
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