Re: [h5md-user] Mandate Variable-length string datatype

[Peter Colberg]

On Tue, Sep 24, 2013 at 05:29:42PM +0200, Felix Höfling wrote:
> Now (since Peter made the vlen string mandatory), the H5MD user reading
> the spec has to bother about the details of HDF5 String. Before (when all
> kinds of HDF5 Strings were allowed), the wording of the spec was simpler
> and the user didn't even have to know that there are different strings [1].

> [1] Actually I didn't either until recently due to HALMD and h5py using
> different string types.

Yes, but don't you see, this is what an explicit choice solves.

Without the explicit specification of string types, a developer will
probably be ignorant; the result is that the user of the developer’s
software will be annnoyed due to the incompatibility of H5MD-using
softwares. (I was annoyed when a highly accelerated large-scale
molecular dynamics package in an earlier version did not read the
H5MD files written by my software ;-).)

Peter