Re: Misleading error message

From: Alfredo Ferrari <alfredo.ferrari_at_cern.ch>
Date: Mon, 9 Aug 2010 16:35:35 +0200

Hi Chris

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.

                 Ciao
                Alfredo

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On Mon, 9 Aug 2010, Chris Theis wrote:

> 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 - 10:49:04 CEST

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