Misleading error message

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 Mon Aug 09 2010 - 15:10:54 CEST