### Last updated 21 January 1997

In this directory you find all the stuff related to the "Type conversion"
library : "libtcapi.sl". This library has been designed as a shared library
which can dynamically be loaded (using dynamic loader functions) in any C
program. It has been loaded and used inside the Ascii Dev shared library.

The purpose of this library is the type conversion. For the moment the only
conversion which is available is : from TACO kernel data types to C strings
(char *) and from C strings (char *) to TACO kernel data types. Each conversion
function in this library follows a strict NAMING CONVENTION. This has been done
to be able to find and to load dynamically the conversion function which is
needed.


This library has simply one C module in which half of the functions to convert
TACO Kernel data types to strings (char *) and the other half to convert strings
(following a defined format) to TACO kernel data types. Example :
tc_DevShort_to_str  and   tc_str_to_DevShort.


Organization of this directory :

           
     --> doc : no documentation is available yet.

     --> include : contains all header files + corresponding RCS dir.
     
     --> lib
         |--->s700 : contains the most recent version of the shared lib for HP
         |--->solaris : contains the most recent version of the shared lib for SUN

     --> src : contains all C code files + Makefile + RCS directory

     --> test_lib : this directory contains a main program which tests every
                    single function of the library in a loop. Everything
                    concerning this test program is put here : C code, Makefile.

In src directory, one can find an archived version of the library with the
corresponding target in the Makefile. The reason is that a shared library
cannot be debugged (see "Programming with HPUX" doc) and the only way of
debugging is to debug the archived version and then rebuild it in shared mode.
So the archived version has only be used in the debugging phase. It will not
be distributed nor supported.

The Solaris version has been tested a bit thanks to the test application, but
needs deeper tests.



     Faranguiss Poncet   2028
