NX datatypes

[Ray Osborn]

When correcting the muddle I made earlier, I realized that I had forgotten
to raise one issue with the API team - and that was the use of our own
datatypes.  It is trivial to implement, and would provide a couple of
benefits.

1) We can't guarantee that HDF5 will use the same DFNT_ convention since I
got the impression it was linked to the particular data model (multifile
SD).  Defining our own will make the transition to newer versions of HDF
more transparent to our users.

2) To C newbies like me, DFNT_UINT8 seems an odd way to refer to
characters.  NX_CHAR seemed more intuitive.

Does anyone have any objections to this proposal.  I presume that it only
requires a few #define statements in napi.h to implement.

Regards,
Ray

------------------------------------------------------
Dr Ray Osborn                  Tel: +1 (630) 252-9011
Materials Science Division     Fax: +1 (630) 252-7777
Argonne National Laboratory    E-mail: ROsborn at anl.gov
Argonne, IL 60439-4845


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