[Biopython-dev] Floats and Double in Cluster

[Michiel Jan Laurens de Hoon]

Peter (BioPython Dev) wrote:
> One for Michiel, as the author of Bio.Cluster
> 
> I've just been building the latest CVS code on Windows with MSVC 6.0
> (Microsoft Visual C++) and noticed there are a lot of warnings about
> double to float conversion (with associated data loss) from
> Bio/Cluster/ranlib.c (see attached output).
> 
> Does this matter?
> 
Probably not. The ranlib library is quite old (maybe fifteen years or 
more). It was originally written in Fortran, and automatically converted 
into C. Such conversions are usually not so clean, so the resulting code 
tends to generate many warning messages. On the other hand, ranlib is a 
part of Numerical Python (the RandomArray module), so if there were a 
serious problem with it it would have been discovered by now.
I did find out recently though that there may be a licensing problem 
with ranlib. Since we're using only a small part of ranlib in 
Bio.Cluster, I'm planning to replace it with a different random number 
generator for the next version.

--Michiel.

-- 
Michiel de Hoon
Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics
Columbia University
1130 St Nicholas Avenue
New York, NY 10032