[Plplot-devel] Ada status

[Alan W. I. <ir...@be...>]

The 2.6.0 issues:

I have just now (revision 8497) put in a bug fix recommended by Brad King
(both for branches/test_cmake/test_ada and trunk) which solves all 2.6.0
issues for a static build of the Ada libraries.  However, there are
remaining 2.6.0 rpath issues for the build tree that do not occur for 2.4.8.
Those issues currently screw up the 2.6.0 ctest of the Ada examples (unless
LD_LIBRARY_PATH is set to work around them), but do not affect the
install-tree tests of Ada.

General Ada issues occurring for both 2.4.8 and 2.6.0:

(1) Example 19 generates the following run-time error message:

raised STORAGE_ERROR : stack overflow (or erroneous memory access)

This is for both the thick and thin 19th examples built on Linux with gnatmake
(installed with the Debian testing 4.1.2-8 version of gnat-4.1):

Jerry, I hope you also see that STORAGE_ERROR on Mac OS X so
that you can debug it locally rather than remotely through me.

Because of this error I had to temporarily remove example 19 from
plplot_test/test_ada.sh.cmake and examples/ada/Makefile.examples.in.

(2) examples 2, 5, 12, 16, and 18 give different results than the
corresponding C examples.  Perhaps there are enough of these differences
now so that Jerry can spot the reason(s) for them.  Ultimately, we want
no differences between the Ada and C results for the standard examples.

General example 21 problem for all front ends:

Example 21 also gives different Ada and C results, but this is a general
issue with example 21 for all front-ends because of differences in the
external random-number generators being used and in their execution times.

We need a volunteer to step forward to change example 21 in C so that it
uses a simple random number generator that is internal to the example
(perhaps something extremely simple but reasonably effective if you pick a
"good" seed such as the middle square method described at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle-square_method) and also so that
execution times are not made part of PLplot labels.  Once these changes were
propagated to the rest of the front ends, this should hopefully make example
21 results uniform for all front-ends.

Alan
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Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation
for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of
Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
(lbproject.sf.net).
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