VOTCA Internal Contributor Language Guide¶
This language guide has been created to establish rules to keep VOTCA’s code consistent between repositories. In the past, there has been difficulty in translating functionality between repositories and within the same repositories because different properties have been used to describe the same object attribute. For general programming guidelines look at the Developers Guide
Types and Ids¶
As an example, consider the csg bead object which had at one time contained the name, type and id attribute. The name of a bead is ill defined and could be unique but was not guaranteed to be so.
If a bead were named C5 it was not clear if this was an arbitrary bead name, or if it was the 5th carbon atom in the system. In any case the name attribute is not needed because if a unique id is needed the id of the bead could be used whereas if the type of the bead was needed the type attribute could be used. As such, the name method and attribute has been removed from the object.
As a general rule, objects should not have a name method or attribute rather, any attribute that is not unique to an object should be indicated with a type method and attribute.
std::string getBeadType();
std::string getResidueType();
To indicate a unique attribute an id should be used.
int getBeadId();
int getMoleculeId();
Units in VOTCA¶
VOTCA tried as much as possible to standardize units across both CSG and
XTP. Externally, we parse in the units of the respective file format,
e.g. .xyz
Angstrom
, .gro
nm
. Internally, we convert all
parsed units to:
CSG: length
nm
, energykJ/mol
and timeps
XTP: length
bohr
, energyHartree
and timeps
Indexing in VOTCA¶
All indices in VOTCA start at 0
. This is useful, because C++ arrays
start at index 0.
Apart from special cases all indices and integers in VOTCA should be
votca::Index
which is a typedef for long int
. .size()
methods of std::containers return an unsigned long int
and should be
cast to votca::Index
. i.e: votca::Index(vector.size())