Re: [Libmesh-users] about period boundary_id

[Roy S. <roy...@ic...>]

On Thu, 13 Nov 2008, luyi wrote:

> there is a problem:
>
> in class BoundaryInfo, the boundary_id type is "short int",
>
> but in class PiriodicBoundary , the type is "unsigned int"?
>
> why?

Mainly because they were designed by different people at different
times.  Space is a big concern in the BoundaryInfo class where you've
got to have an id stored for each boundary side/node, so whoever wrote
that used a short.  Space isn't a big concern in the
PeriodicBoundaries class where you just need two ids for each whole
boundary, so I didn't think about using anything other than an int.

Has this caused you problems, or did you just notice a discrepancy?

My fantasy is to one day make every identifier of this sort into it's
own type, so that people who for some reason need more than, say, 2
billion elements or 32 thousand boundary ids, can make those changes
quickly.
---
Roy