Naming conventions and Allocation/Deallocation schemes

The general rule is that all type and function names defined by the library are prefixed with ap_, in order to prevent name conflicts with other libraries. Moreover, functions operating on objects of type ap_typ_t are usually prefixed with ap_typ_op.

Given an object of datatype ap_typ_t*, two kinds of allocation/deallocation pairs of functions may be defined:

1. variable declaration: ap_typ_t obj;
   • Initialization: void typ_init(ap_typ_t* arg, ...) or ap_typ_t ap_typ_make(...)
   • Finalization: void ap_typ_clear(ap_typ_t* arg)
   this pair of functions follows the semantics used in the GMP library. The first function initializes the object of type ap_typ_t pointed to by arg, and fills it with a valid content. The second function deallocates the memory possibly pointed to by fields of the object *arg, but do not attempt to deallocate the memory pointed by arg.
2. variable declaration: ap_typ_t* obj;
   • Allocation ap_typ_t* ap_typ_alloc(...)
   • Deallocation void ap_typ_free(ap_typ_t* arg)
   the first function allocates an object of type typ_t and then calls a ap_typ_init-like function on the result; the second functions first call a ap_typ_clear-like function and then deallocate the memory pointed by arg.