Ray, > Our Group asked me to follow up the issue you reported. I understand that > you want to declare a dimension size to be zero and you won't write any data > to it. A data space with zero dimension size is totally empty. It only > shows the number (or rank) of the dimensions. Is this correct?
Almost. Such a dataspace is indeed empty (no data), but it still contains more information than the rank: 1) The datatype 2) The size of each dimension, of which at least one is zero. Point 2) is the main difference to H5S_EMPTY. It is useful to have the full dimension information to avoid introducing special cases into applications. An example: suppose my data model specifies that the coordinates of N points are stored in an array of type float and dimension [N 3]. A validator for this data model would then check that the size of the second dimension is 3, which should be possible even if N happens to be zero. Konrad. -- --------------------------------------------------------------------- Konrad Hinsen Centre de Biophysique Moléculaire, CNRS Orléans Synchrotron Soleil - Division Expériences Saint Aubin - BP 48 91192 Gif sur Yvette Cedex, France Tel. +33-1 69 35 97 15 E-Mail: research AT khinsen DOT fastmail DOT net --------------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ Hdf-forum is for HDF software users discussion. [email protected] http://mail.hdfgroup.org/mailman/listinfo/hdf-forum_hdfgroup.org
