Re: [Gnu3dkit-dev] another tuple q

[Philippe C . D . Robert]

On Tuesday, October 15, 2002, at 04:49  Uhr, Brent Gulanowski wrote:

> - (float *)elements
> {
>   return tuple;
> }
>
> Here you are giving away the goods, so to speak. At which point, I'm 
> wondering why use an Obj-C class instead of  a struct? I am not saying 
> it's a bad thing, only that I'm getting mixed signals here. Would you 
> consider returning a (const float *) to make it read only? If one 
> wants to use the elements of a tuple/vector in a loop, wouldn't one be 
> able to request a copy of the elements (using -setElements: ) before 
> doing the loop work?

Well, often in APIs like OpenGL you need to pass the elements of a 
tuple as float*, so the functionality is required. It could be const 
float* but then you would have to cast it for OpenGL everywhere you use 
it, and this is ugly...

So this is a good example where I sacrifice elegance and OO concepts 
for performance and usability.

> I'm just being the encapsulation religious purist for devil's advocate 
> reasons. My personal feeling is that users are welcome to hang 
> themselves if they want to use the rope for that purpose. But in case 
> you've got a particular reason, I'm curious to hear it.

In general I agree, but here ... see above.

-Phil
--
Philippe C.D. Robert
http://www.nice.ch/~phip