On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 10:26:35AM -0400, Adam Phillippy wrote: > Hi Charles, > I tested the patch you forwarded and it was nonfunctional. It attempted to > construct a two-dimensional array "D" of dimensions (M+1 x N+1) like so: > > * D_buf = (int *) calloc ( (M+1)*(N+1), sizeof(int) ) ; > ** D = &D_buf ; > * > > > This compiles, but doesn't work. There is no way to allocate a 2D matrix > dynamically by only using malloc.
Well, I do not question whether the patch is right or wrong but this statement in itself is definitely wrong. You can perfectly allocate a flat memory area with pointers (to store for instance the data rows of your aray). Moreover you allocate a vector of pointers with the number of rows you want to store. Once you have done this you loop over the pointer elements of this vector and let them point into the flat array with an offset of (row number)*(number of columns)*(size of array element). The reason why this works is the syntactical equality of *(ptr + i) and ptr[i] The advantage of this approach is that you can handle all array elements equally in a flat loop if the context needs no array position. For instance I have once written an image processing program which needed to process a negativ of the image which is the same process for any pixel regardless of the position. That works quite fast with the method described above and is a very common way to store data on C. At the same time you always have to make sure that the array is initialised correctly - in C you aways buy performance by giving away the safety against memory corruption. > To do the proper pointer arithmetic the > D[row][col] operators used later in this source need to know at least one > dimension of the matrix. As I tried to explain above: The theory says this is not true. > This is known for static arrays, but not for > dynamic arrays. The patch you forwarded always leads to a memory access > error. I can not assure that the patch above might not have some memory access problems (and I currently have no time to verify). But that's an issue of the actual implementation - not the general principle. > I implemented my own patch that handles the 2D pointer arithmetic in a small > wrapper class. This new version is tested and dynamically allocates the > memory, so it should fit your needs. You can find the new version of the > "annotate.cc" file here: > > http://mummer.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/mummer/MUMmer/src/tigr/annotate.cc?revision=1.3&view=markup > > This is included in a new MUMmer release (v3.22) I cut last week. It is fine for me if it works - so there is no need for sticking to the solution I suggested above. I just wanted to correct general statements about C here on a public list. Thanks for working on MUMmer and I think it is fine to fetch the new release once it is released instead of fiddling around with patches of the old version. Kind regards Andreas. -- http://fam-tille.de Klarmachen zum Ändern! -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected]
