On 12/15/2010 02:02 PM, Brice Goglin wrote: ...
As I said, we're trying to keep things consistent. My understanding is that a function should have a topology parameter if it traverses some links between objects inside the topology. If it only operates on a given object and does not traverse the topology at all, it will likely not need any topology parameter.
I noticed that some functions (in or not in the ABI I don't recall right now, I'm not at my desk) need the topology parameter only because the topology structure holds pointers to platform-specific routines. That seems like a confusing generalization of the parameter's meaning/purpose. It would be helpful, when creating bindings for object-oriented languages, if for instance operations on bindings could be methods of the bindings object, without the complication of holding the topology pointer in each object instance.
--Guy
