[geos-devel] c api feedback

[Stephen Woodbridge]

Charlie,

Thanks for all your work and analysis. I am a user of C-API and I would 
vote for consistency. I think the whole idea of a published and 
supported API among or things is to provide a consistent view of the 
underlying code and to hide some of the oddities that might exist in 
that code. I would rather the API take care of things like consistent 
return values rather then have to have that spread all over in my code. 
Great if it needs a type cast then do it in the wrapper so it is easy to 
work with return values.

My 2 cents, which isn't worth that much since I'm doing the coding. And 
thanks to all those that are working so hard on this.

Best regards,
   -Steve

Charlie Savage wrote:
>> 1.  The methods GEOSCoordSeq_getSize and GEOSCoordSeq_getDimensions 
>> return their results by updating a pointer to a size_t parameter.  
>> Thus like this:
>>
>> GEOSCoordSeq_getSize(const GEOSCoordSeq s, size_t *size);
>>
>> In contrast, these methods just return the result:
>>
>> GEOSGeom_getDimensions returns value, not as a parameter
>> GEOSGeom_getNumcoordinates
>> GEOSGeom_getNumInteriorRings
>> GEOSGeom_getNumGeometries
>>
>> Seems like an unneeded inconsistency.
> 
> A follow up to this.  The methods like GEOSGeom_genNumcoordinates are 
> defined like this:
> 
> /* Return -1 on exception */
> extern size_t GEOS_DLL GEOSGetNumCoordinates(const GEOSGeom g1);
> 
> However, size_t is defined as:
> 
> typedef unsigned int size_t
> 
> So returning -1 isn't such a good idea is it?  You'd have to type cast 
> to an int first to check the result.
> 
> Charlie
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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