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FTN95 64-bit beta test
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IanLambley



Joined: 17 Dec 2006
Posts: 490
Location: Sunderland

PostPosted: Tue May 17, 2016 12:27 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Dan,
I think you should refrain from that language. The writers Of SimplePlot are retired I believe.
Ian
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DanRRight



Joined: 10 Mar 2008
Posts: 2813
Location: South Pole, Antarctica

PostPosted: Tue May 17, 2016 2:10 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I do not know which version of my post you have seen as i usually write/rewrite/edit many times. They might be retired or not it does not matter at all. Is it hard to provide, sell, or give as a free gift their code to Silverfrost or may be somehow help to port it or just explain what we can expect from them (yes or no)?

We asked them that here, they participated in the discussion but said nothing definite. By the way besides royalties to them for Simpleplot from Salford Fortran I purchased, i also bought their another app for Android, gave it good review and supported with that their school programmers they were supervising.

If the source code for %pl will not be provided we should move to different application instead of waiting. This small app is handy but has too many defects and has primitive obsolete look

Without %pl the consistency of Clearwin+ is broken and the legacy applications now will not work with 64bit version.

It is only small simple part of Simpleplot source actually needed - the regular standard X-Y graphics plotting utility. Most part of %pl i believe is Silverfrost's own programming for Clearwin+. Graphics plotting engine actually can be taken from other graphics packages. We might all together write one here. I for example have my own ones too. As if it is a big deal to plot the axis, tick, number and connect two points with the line. Big deal is to make all look professional. Simpleplot has very amateurish look and feel
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DanRRight



Joined: 10 Mar 2008
Posts: 2813
Location: South Pole, Antarctica

PostPosted: Thu Jul 14, 2016 9:54 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

You all know that I was waiting for this compiler to be 64bit for many years. And you know why. Many codes need all possible tricks to fit them into 32bit space. While i am waiting for final touches to be added (the debugger in 64bit mode, the Simpleplot to work) my codes sometimes remind me that they often live by themselves. That what i call devilry. Today i woke up, looked at the screen and what i got was totally shocking: wow, the results are totally corrupted, and when plotted what the devil's horns they generated instead of typical standard nice looking x-ray spectra? And how color appeared on supposedly black and white palette plot ? I suppose Silverfrost will soon complete the compiler which will help me to switch to 64bit and perform all so needed "exorcism" from my too small arrays and hell know how working stack. Otherwise it might be that i will need to seek another help. Devious or medical Smile



Last edited by DanRRight on Mon Jul 18, 2016 9:35 pm; edited 1 time in total
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mecej4



Joined: 31 Oct 2006
Posts: 1885

PostPosted: Thu Jul 14, 2016 12:04 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Dan,

A three-horned Mr. Devil? Or are you now into doing root-canals on alligators? Yikes! "Keep mouth fully open, please, while I pass this needle through!"

Please share the secret recipe that you use for including images inline in your post. Just yesterday, I needed to do this in another post:

http://forums.silverfrost.com/viewtopic.php?t=3290

Thanks.
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DanRRight



Joined: 10 Mar 2008
Posts: 2813
Location: South Pole, Antarctica

PostPosted: Thu Jul 14, 2016 12:55 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Mecej4, Yea... I'm also kind of puzzled about third horn/tooth Smile

Posting is easy, it's just few clicks work and is totally intuitive. You basically do not need my instructions. But just in case since the first time is most difficult part of any easy job:

1) go to Postimage dot org. I use it for years. You can post anonymously but being registered gives you control over your images which you can delete or reload/edit later on. This was the entire trick of posting images most people fail because anyone expects one obvious thing that this forum will accept and keep the image. Well, it will not hell know why, the disk space now cost nothing
2) click on "choose image" ("browse" on old website) button on their website. The popped up menu will allow you easily browse your computer for images. Click on desired image.
3) Postimage will then upload it and give you many different options for the possible links used on different forums and websites. I take "direct link" option to post here. Do highlight it and save it in your clipboard: Ctrl+C.
4) Now go to your forum, this one or any other, and click on "Img" button while you are writing your post in the forum. This will automatically place the HTML tag to include the image. You can also do that manually (I can not write these few letters since this will influence the current post misformatting it)
5) Ctrl+V image link there
6) Click on "Img" button again to close the HTML image placing command (or again write the same with slash manually)


Last edited by DanRRight on Thu Jul 14, 2016 2:39 pm; edited 1 time in total
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mecej4



Joined: 31 Oct 2006
Posts: 1885

PostPosted: Thu Jul 14, 2016 2:33 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Thanks for the recipe, will try next time I want to include image.
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John-Silver



Joined: 30 Jul 2013
Posts: 1520
Location: Aerospace Valley

PostPosted: Fri Jul 22, 2016 10:33 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Just for the record, the fundamentals of Dan's explanation above are given in the forum FAQ as ......



Maybe it would be a good idea to add a version of Dan's specific instructions either there, or in the KBase (although I note it's a long, long time since that appears to have been used a a conduit for 'Hor to Do ... ' stuff, and/or a cross link to this very post/page.


Last edited by John-Silver on Fri Feb 15, 2019 9:40 pm; edited 1 time in total
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John-Silver



Joined: 30 Jul 2013
Posts: 1520
Location: Aerospace Valley

PostPosted: Fri Jul 22, 2016 10:45 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

... and then there's the mention of SimplePlot .....

I think at the end of the day it's horses for courses.
I'm pretty sure that it's not as simple as nwe could imagine it to 'update' Simpleplot, even if the retired developers had offerred up the code.

Even with a singl person at the helm updating such code (to their preferences) there would always be a large proportion who wanted something just slightly different, or presented in a slightly different way.

That's why there's Excel after all, one of the finest all round general purpose programs in esistence, and easily useable (some would say too easily useable as in 'any idiot can use it' type easily useable, but that's another subject.

Of course the big, big problemo is the interface with 'real' (FORTRAN) Smile ) programs . Mayhbe it would/should be easier for Silverfrost to develope an interface to Excel files for data (direct to Excel .xls Files, not just .csv format) rather than building in a new plotting code ????

Now THAT would certainly get the paying punters in I'd have thought ? ..... or maybe not ?

Of course, the problems 'what spec is required' since evn with the best of intentions things take n times the time originally estimated where n is somewhere between x2 and x10 !!! in my experience
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mecej4



Joined: 31 Oct 2006
Posts: 1885

PostPosted: Fri Jul 22, 2016 11:13 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

For a slightly different view of Excel, see

https://oit.utk.edu/research/documentation/Documents/ExcelStatProbs.pdf

or Google for "Friends don't let friends use Excel for" .

In the hands of many, Excel can be the easiest and fastest tool -- for making a mess.
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John-Silver



Joined: 30 Jul 2013
Posts: 1520
Location: Aerospace Valley

PostPosted: Sat Jul 23, 2016 4:56 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I agree completely mecej4 !!! which is why I wrote ...
Quote:
some would say too easily useable as in 'any idiot can use it


What I wrote above may have come across as an Excel 'lover' but that wasn't the intention, far from it.
It is however proabably the greatest piece of software written in modern times (and ancient times for that matter Wink ) despite all it's shortcomings.

I googled as you suggested and will have to take some time to digest everything found (I found myself having opened 10 tabs within 3 minutes !!!) but this one quote in one article sums it up nicely ,,,,

Quote:
Let’s face it: We all have seen a crazy Microsoft Excel spreadsheet or encountered one of its dreaded “Not Responding” messages. Unfortunately, the flexibility and ease of Excel makes it the ideal candidate for inappropriate use and widespread abuse.


As for the article you linked to, I find it rather tame in it's criticism !, and it's 100% slanted to statistics use - any other discipline could equally come up with a dozen different criticisms !!! The statistical criticisms could be easily solved by using VBA macros to personalise their methods !!!

And there's the rub ..... each 'discipline' has different requirenėments for software, whether it be excel, fortran programs, or whatever, so no one is going to be able to satisfy everyone !!!

But the fact is Excel is flexible, VERY flexible indeed (even if there''s a price to that flexibility in terms of man hours and mis-use, but eh, nothing comes for free - and the project manager (the paymaster) would be able to use the results (and convert them to the format he wanted - hands up who's been there ! LOL - there should be a law against project managers being allowed to touch calculation spreadsheets but the world isn't perfect Smile )

Which brings me back to the subject mattr and why I posted the above, and the topic which is getting a half-decent plotting capability somehow integrated into FTN95. THis could be done using Excel, the priėoblem being getting the data into an Excel file in a form to automatically plot it, which is why I made my suggestion, but not only that but because Excel is 'universal', not in that it can do the technical things always 100% (but no one's going to use it for calculations in this contecėxt as those would be done (correctly one hopes) within the Fortran. The 'beauty' (I use the term loosley here) being that the user could interactively intervene to change all the necessary plotting parameters at his/her will, which would be a much larger task for Silvefrost to build into any potential update of SimplePlot (assuming the code was someday available). It would be a bit more flexible than the other options such as for example using SIMDEM commands, since those options depend on you making decisions about the plotting within the program code, and which then becaėomes a monster to consider ALL possible user requirements and of course integrte them.

That was the point of the suggestion.
It would of course be interesting to hear Silverfrost's view on it all (beyond the previous 'we don't have the Simpleplot source code to modify it' or the more recent 'we'll look into it' for the PPlot suggestion but eh I'm pragmatic and realise that it's not so easy to committ to anything when the length of the string is unknown, however some kind of dialogue to get a handle on the users needs BEOFREHAND would seem a prerequisite if anything was going to be done to resolve what is one of the programs bit deficiencies impo.
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DanRRight



Joined: 10 Mar 2008
Posts: 2813
Location: South Pole, Antarctica

PostPosted: Sat Jul 23, 2016 8:50 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

The Simpleplot (i am talking about %pl only) actually was almost ~95% close to be ideal production quality simple plotting software when it was abandoned and worst of all left then Salford with no sources.

I wrote already with the examples what was left to do to make %pl to compete with Matlab, Mathematica, OriginLab and Excel

1) make all real*8 otherwise it crashes with numbers larger then 1e25
2) adjust a bit default fonts, their sizes and positions
3) add for X and Y axis one more standard design - square (4 axis instead of 2, see pictures below)
4) make it know that the initial data is changed and replot without reload
5) Add Y_Max same way as Y_Min
6) make other small fixes and additions like font size and line width which currently are external

Ideally Simpleplot could be made interactively adjustable by right clicking on the plot items and getting all settings in menu form (see pic below). There you can change axis parameters, fonts, line widths and their styles, colors and even the plotted data itself. The parameters then would be saved and next time this plot will automatically use these settings. Or share them among all other plots. All parameters in Settings menu have to be graphical, not textual.

See? What left to adjust is almost nothing, 95% of major work is already done. it is not acceptable anymore to plot the crappy way by hand on transparencies or using poor quality software like Simpleplot.

But i actually almost done all that myself with the help of you guys here, including you, John. Things are that Simpleplot uses character variable as its online settings. So instead of hard program it inside the source like this

Code:
i=winio@(%pl('title="Test Plot", color=red,n_graphs=2, Y_min=1%ff&', 600, 400, n, X, Y1, Y2)


i simply add changeable, flexible way of using settings

Code:
character*320 charVar
charVar = 'title="Test Plot", color=red,n_graphs=2, Y_min=1%ff&'
iXsize=600; iYsize=400
i=winio@(charVar, iXsize, iYsize, n, X, Y1, Y2)
i=winio@(%rs,charVar)


So i see the variable on the screen together with the plot, change there everything i need (the %rs works also like a microeditor!) and just click to force the simpleplot to replot the screen. Since #4 above does not work i need to close current plot and open it again. Font size, line width, header size are changed separately too. Each time charVar and other plot settings are saved into the Settings file. Done!

I even added the ability to plot many graphs simultaneously adding many fake Y1, Y2, Y3 etc arrays which are initially empty. Ideally it has to be a single two dimensional array dynamically changeable rank with usual Fortran90 way.

Here is one example how it looks. Blue highlighted part is the CharVar like above:


This is why i started to love the Salford's idea of plotting despite i hate its terrible implementation together with Simpleplot developers (why it probably was called Simpleplot in order not to be called a SuckersPlot or CrappoPlot).

Ultimately you have to be able to edit all visually right on screen like in OriginLab software. You click on axis, caption or tick marks and change its parameters in popup menu. To Silverfrost it is easy to add

So are you still advocating for Excel or want to convince Silverfrost to further develop potentially killing in simplicity, powerful in implementation and godlike looking even for Science and Nature journals software (name has to be changed to SilverPlot), John ?


Last edited by DanRRight on Mon Jul 25, 2016 11:36 pm; edited 3 times in total
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DanRRight



Joined: 10 Mar 2008
Posts: 2813
Location: South Pole, Antarctica

PostPosted: Mon Jul 25, 2016 7:32 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

It is better to show ones then to say 100 times. Here is what i meant that has to be added for %pl to be ideal. On top is its settings which are invoked when you click on anything on the plot. For experienced programmers like Silverfrost this is just a month or two of work



Last edited by DanRRight on Thu Jul 28, 2016 6:51 pm; edited 2 times in total
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JohnCampbell



Joined: 16 Feb 2006
Posts: 2554
Location: Sydney

PostPosted: Mon Jul 25, 2016 9:31 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Mecej4,

I find the criticism of Excel statistics a bit (lot) of a beat-up !
If you are suffering from round-off errors in Excel standard deviation calculation, which uses 64 bit precision, perhaps the criticism should be directed at those using a poorly constructed data-set rather than the computing tool.

As for the regression criticism, I wonder what R-squared was. Probably 0.1.

Excel is a very good tool to get a rough idea of what the data looks like. I regularly use pivot tables to review data and identify potential relationships.

I remember in 70's, someone complained that a competitors Finite Element program was useless because for a particular calculation it (effectively) used (length**3) / length, rather than use length**2; when the real problem was that in their modelling, they used element lengths that were totally unsuitable. They also used 32-bit precision in their comparison.

This supports the claim that statisticians can lie with statistics.

John
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mecej4



Joined: 31 Oct 2006
Posts: 1885

PostPosted: Mon Jul 25, 2016 11:11 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

That critical article is dated 2001. The criticism in it probably applies to Excel '97 or the next version (2000?). I have faint memories of reading a more recent article that reported (item by item) issues that were fixed in later versions of Excel.

Early NA texts used the running update of the mean and STD of a time-series as a good test case to show that mathematically equivalent formulae can give substantially different finite-precision results, and emphasized the need for accumulating sums in double precision even when the data was all single precision.
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John-Silver



Joined: 30 Jul 2013
Posts: 1520
Location: Aerospace Valley

PostPosted: Tue Jul 26, 2016 4:28 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

John C. - I agree completely with your observation which sums up as :-
Quote:
Bad mathematicians (the author of the article) aqre only too ready to blame their tools when the results don't come out as they expect

Mind what else should be expect with statisticians Wink (I being of the applied maths ilk myself).

mecej4 - the problem is thatthat articl is quoted absolutely everywhere and referenced in many, many more up to date articles as some kind of god-like reference, and we all know how god-like references oft get mis-used/interpreted !

DanR - all your points are well founded , but it's obvious the %pl interface with SimplePlot ain't goin' anywhere fast if it's even on the Silverfrost dėradar right now. (as evidenced by complete lack of practical input from Silverfrost on the subject last time and this time around - sorry, saying we can't do anything because we don't have the source code is an explanation, but doesn't solve the problem). Which is a pity.

What's clear is that OSMETHING needs to be done imo since all the other options are somewhat 'tortuous' in one way or another.

As an absolute minimum I'd have thought that some kind of robust 'interface' to one, or several, of the other plotting packages out there, gnuplot ? Pplot ? DISLIN ? , etc... (so a 3rd party plot package could be used WITHIN %gr windows) would be a minimum I'd have thought. Or maybe to all ! (eventually).
Then again, any one of those options has the same 'drawback' of familiarity of yet another code (another level of birdsnest if you like) to be learned.

I don't think 1-2 months even for a re-hash of %pl is realistic because, and this is the point, users opinions-bviews need taking into account to make sur ethe majority of things people want are at least attempted to be implemented in some way.

so, that's why I threw onto the table into the melting pot the idea of maybe an Excel interface via the direct creation of .xls files, assuming that there was some clever way of doing it relatively easily, and hence 'cheaply' (time as well as money).
That way all the 'internals' of plotting options or sort of 'external' if you see what I mean and don't weigh down any programme dėvelopment.

With an excel option I thought there just must be a (I assume) relatively simple interface to generate with Excel by writing files drectly out (as a .xls file not cvs as I mentioned in my original laboured droolings on the subject above).
Why at a later date who knows there could be development to output the file with plots already nominally created and ready for instant editting/formatting by the user !!! Why even maybe editable from within the a %gr window by activating Excel as a sub-process from within ... oops sorry getting carried away now ! Wink

After all programmers like options, it gives them the impression that they're taking reasoned, logical decisions Wink Wink.

I have no idea what would be best for the majority of people, I just know absolutely for sure that different people have different favourite horses for their courses.

What I think developers sometimes lose track of in the hurdy-gudy world of commercial programming, undoubtedly for a number of valid (from their perspective) commercial reasons, is that 95% (maybe more) of the users (customers) are by far in the majority 'simple' (maybe that was the psycological logic behingėd naming SimplePlot) and are looking for/need:- a) useability b) useability c) useability ...... d) no stupid linėmitations e) few unexpected limitations (Dan your 1.0 e15 might fit in here, lol, - commercial opportunity for Silverfrost to introduce a 'Physicists-Astronomers 'Special Extended Edition' maybe Wink, ) ..... somewhere approaching h) some useful options ,.... somewhere around i) some nice features....... z) extreme technical capability.

Drool #2 over ... and out .
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