### 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.


In directory, one can find an archived version of the library with the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

		README for Type Conversion library of TACO 
		-------------------------------------------

The TACO type conversion library is accessed from clients, applications and
any program which need to convert the "TACO Kernel types" to and from a basic
C type.

For the moment only the conversion to and from string (C type) is available.

Files needed to build the TACO conversion library are :

	tc_str.c - Contains all the functions to convert a TACO Kernel type to
                   a C string and the other way (convert a C string to a TACO
                   Kernel type).

To be able to test and to debug the library a test application is developped.
It can be found under ../test_lib directory.

                   
