Re: Proposed Data Access Conventions Section

John May (johnmay@llnl.gov)
Tue, 15 Apr 1997 13:05:47 -0700

Bill Nitzberg writes:
> I am trying to clean up the introductory material in the I/O
> chapter, and it is clear that the chapter would be more readable
> if the common conventions were all grouped into one place.

Shouldn't there be a bit more discussion of the file pointer
types here (shared vs. independent) and how they are updated,
or at least a reference to that information elsewhere?

You describe the buftypes pretty carefully but say nothing
about filetypes. I assume that's because it's described in
under Views. There should be a reference to that as well.

> The number of \mpiarg{etype} or \mpiarg{datatype} elements accessed
> can be extracted from \mpiarg{status}
> using the routines \func{MPI\_GET\_COUNT} or \func{MPI\_GET\_ELEMENTS}.

This sentence is still very misleading. You should say
explicitly that you get the count of etypes and buftypes
from MPI_Get_count (either directly or by doing the math yourself,
whatever we decide), and you get the number of basic types from
MPI_Get_elements.

John