[agtk-devel] AG API -- list return type

[Kazuaki M. <ma...@un...>]

Dear developers who use the AG API,

We are interested in hearing your opinions about the following possible
changes in the API.

In the current AG API, functions that return sets of ID's, names, etc. have
the return type of "string" instead of "list".  For example,
GetAnnotationSetByOffset returns a string that may look like
"AGSet1:AG1:Annotation1 AGSet1:AG1:Annotation2 ...".  This requires
additional processing on the application side.  We are thinking about
changing the API in a future version of AGLIB such that these functions
return lists instead of strings.

This change would affect the following types in ag.idl.

  typedef string AGIds;
  typedef string AnnotationIds;
  typedef string AnchorIds;
  typedef string SignalIds;
  typedef string FeatureNames;
  typedef string Features;

The new types would be something like the following.  These will be
lists (or arrays) in C++, Python, Java and Tcl.

  typedef sequence<AGId> AGIds;
  typedef sequence<AnnotationId> AnnotationIds;
  typedef sequence<AnchorId> AnchorIds;
  typedef sequence<SignalIds> string SignalIds;
  typedef sequence<FeatureNames> string FeatureNames;

This change in the API would require changes in applications if they are to
use the new version of AGLIB.  In order to have a painless change to the
newer API, we are thinking about adding a configuration(compile)-time
switch to choose the return types of the affected functions.

We'd welcome any options concerning 1) whether such changes should be made,
or 2) whether there are better ways to doing the changes.

Thank you,
-Kazuaki Maeda (LDC)