RE: Misleading error message

Hi Alfredo,

Thanks for the quick reply. I understand the reasoning of not wanting to
break compatibility but it might be helpful for the user to have some
echo of the interpreted region description in order to identify such
problems.

Ciao
Chris

------------------------------------------------------------------------
-----------------
Chris Theis
CERN/DGS-RP - European Organization for Nuclear Research
1211 Geneva 23, Switzerland
Phone: +41 22 767 8069 Office: 892-2A-015
e-mail: Christian.Theis@cern.ch www: http://www.cern.ch/theis
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-----------------

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Alfredo Ferrari [mailto:alfredo.ferrari_at_cern.ch]
> Sent: 09 August 2010 16:36
> To: Chris Theis
> Cc: fluka-discuss_at_fluka.org
> Subject: Re: Misleading error message
>=20
> Hi Chris
>=20
> the 132 character limitation is intrinsics to a lot of fortran 77
compilers (not
> g77, but for example the Digital/Compaq compiler we used until a
couple of
> years ago). For a formatted (ascii) file going beyond 132 could create
> portability problems and I do not see a reason why we should do it.
Actually
> the "old" geometry format was limited to less than 80 (80 and 132
being the
> two standard lengths for ascii files in fortran). Since one could put
as many
> continuation lines as he wishes I would stick with a length which is
surely
> accepted on all systems/compilers.
>=20
> Ciao
> Alfredo
>=20
>=20
>
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
> | Alfredo Ferrari || Tel.: +41.22.76.76119
|
> | CERN-EN/STI || Fax.: +41.22.76.69474
|
> | 1211 Geneva 23 || e-mail: Alfredo.Ferrari_at_cern.ch
|
> | Switzerland ||
|
>
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
>=20
> On Mon, 9 Aug 2010, Chris Theis wrote:
>=20
> > Hello,
> >
> > I've recently encountered a case of a very misleading error message
> > which actually masked a problem of the FLUKA parser rather than a
real
> > problem of the input.
> >
> > Running an input using parentheses I got the following message "STOP
> > EXP2RP: Unbalanced parenthesis statement executed" and the run
> stopped
> > short of providing any detailed information where in the geometry
> > this problem had occurred. In the output file I could only find the
> > echo of the bodies and the info about the length of the FPD-Array as
> > the last entry.
> >
> > This made it a rather cumbersome undertaking to pin down the
problem,
> > especially because there were no unbalanced parentheses in the
input.
> > After spending a lot of time trying to extract more information I
> > found that the actual problem was not at all related to a
syntactical
> > error in the input but rather to the fact that one line had 133
> > characters while the limit seems to be 132. As a consequence FLUKA
had
> > silently ignored the trailing region description which lead to the
> > error message of the unbalanced parentheses. Maybe I have overlooked
> > something but I couldn't find this restriction in the manual.
> >
> > Obviously the geometry description that could be read in the file
> > differed from the one that FLUKA interpreted. Therefore, I wanted to
> > ask if it would be possible to print out at least FLUKA's
> > interpretation of the last region that caused a problem.
Furthermore,
> > the limitation to
> > 132 characters or bytes strikes as somewhat odd at a time where each
> > computer contains several gigabytes of memory. As dynamic arrays are
> > not yet available in F77 would it be possible to increase this
> > restriction to, for example, 1024? This would at least virtually
> > remove the limitation for the user.
> >
> > Cheers
> > Chris
> >
> >
Received on Tue Aug 10 2010 - 10:47:30 CEST