Re: Bug? yea or nay.

[Nigel Wade <nmw(at)ion.le.ac.uk>]

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Original Message <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

On 16/02/01, 14:35:09, Paul van Delst <pvandelst@ncep.noaa.gov> wrote 
regarding Re: Bug? yea or nay.:



> Also, FWIW, I disagree with Nigel Wade that this is "operator error". I 
think N_TAGS
> should return the sum total of the sizes of the structure elements, NOT 
the amount of
> memory said structure occupies. 

But it doesn't, and the documentation quite clearly says it doesn't. 
That's why I said "operator error" and not "bug".

> If one was dealing with accessing system memory for OS
> purposes, fine. But IDL is a simple tool for playing with data - why 
should the user care
> whether the structure is padded in memory or not? 

The user may want to find out how much memory would be used by a large 
array of structures.
You can actually work out the sum of the size of the individual elements, 
but you cannot 
work out the amount of memory required to hold the structure.

-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------
Nigel Wade, System Administrator, Space Plasma Physics Group,
            University of Leicester, Leicester, LE1 7RH, UK 
E-mail :    nmw@ion.le.ac.uk 
Phone :     +44 (0)116 2523568, Fax : +44 (0)116 2523555