Re: [Core] Components design

Herman Bruyninckx wrote :
| On Sat, 8 Sep 2001, Henrik I. Christensen wrote:
| 
| [...] For example: components can exchange information about
| positions and orientations of a robot end-effector in homogeneous
| transformation matrix form, but sometime other representations might
| be more appropriate (e.g., when both modules convert to
| homogeneous transformation matrices for the purpose of communication
| only).

An interresting data representation that tries to tackle this problem can
be found in TCL: the Tcl_Obj structure defines a) the internal data
structure and b) an external data representation (ascii string in the
case of TCL). When a new data type is defined, procedures to convert from
and to the external data representation must be given.
Conversions are of course done only when neceseray.

We might not be able to implement exactly the same thing, but I think
this idea is interesting, and it is especially well suited to positions
and orientations.


| Good suggestion... Isn't this the idea behind the UDDI standard?
|  (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration)
|  <http://www.uddi.org/>

Thanks for the link!