JGR wrote:Such a change would not be difficult, it's just one function which would need to be changed. However it could result in the breaking of existing applications expecting a switch in decimal perhaps with the validdigits parameter.
The breaking has already been done, now we're trying to find a solution
An application that doesn't know about the "base=x" directive would read the 33333333333 as a decimal just like it would today, because it is defined as a
range and doesn't have any special character in front of it, ergo: decimal. The
validdigits is, as I said, a kind of hack, or the
range value in
curves is a hack.
The benefit of introducing
base would be that we keep all information about the switch in the XML file (ie. it
is still a 32bit number, but is displayed/stored in another format) which, IMO, is the whole point of this file. For TTDPC it would also mean a minor adjustment instead of a whole-sale change of data type (Int64 instead of Integer). To be honest, I only know of two programs using SWITCHES.XML - TTDPC and TTDXC.
Also manipulation of unusual bases tends to be a bit of a pain on the client (ie. your) end (there aren't really standard c functions for outputing strings from numbers in an arbitrary base).
Not a problem for me, at least. My Delphi (Pascal) snippets collection already has functions for this, in both directions.