[vtk-developers] What is vtkFloatingPointType?

[David Cole]

On Wed, Nov 7, 2012 at 4:28 PM, David Gobbi <david.gobbi at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 7, 2012 at 1:56 PM, Sean McBride <sean at rogue-research.com> wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> grepping VTK master for "vtkFloatingPointType" finds just 19 occurrences in just 5 files, including vtkType.h:272:
>>
>> #define vtkFloatingPointType vtkFloatingPointType
>>
>> which clang warns about:
>>
>> warning: disabled expansion of recursive macro [-Wdisabled-macro-expansion]
>>
>> I suspect vtkFloatingPointType is leftover crud?  It seems if we just change vtkDiscreteMarchingCubes.cxx to use float directly, vtkFloatingPointType is not needed at all?
>
> It's leftover cruft to allow compatibility between VTK 4.2 and VTK
> 4.4.  It has been irrelevant since the release of VTK 5.0.  Anywhere
> that it occurs (except for vtkType.h) it should be replaced with
> "double".
>
> As for the "#define vtkFloatingPointType vtkFloatingPointType", it
> serves the purpose of allowing people to do this:
>
> #ifdef vtkFloatingPointType
>
> I'd imagine that there are a few (old) third-party packages that use
> this ifdef.
>
>  - David
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If it needs to be kept, we could at least just:

  #define vtkFloatingPointType double

and remove the typedef, couldn't we?

That would get rid of the clang warning. It's a little surprising (to
me, at least) to see a symbol name that is both a typedef and a
#define...