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Status of Patchy

  Julius Zoll ECP/RA and Gottfried Kellner ECP/DI

After twenty years of faithful service the maintenance for the version 4 of Patchy is now stopped completely. Users who plan to continue to use Patchy for the foreseeable future are urged to migrate to the much-improved version 5 which was released last year, after having been used for a couple of years in all the work of the author.

The new reference manual can be found on:

ftp://asisftp.cern.ch/cernlib/doc/ps.dir/p5refman.ps.gz

or in

http://wwwinfo.cern.ch/asdoc/

as P5 Reference

The release note, which summarizes the changes, is found in the same directory as

p5release.ps.gz

Although the occasion of a re-write of Patchy was seized to provide a number of substantial improvements, back-compatibility was ensured to a very high degree, with 2 exceptions:

1)
the new version is much better at catching errors on Patchy control lines; obviously one did not want to artificially build the deficiencies of the old version (which was developed on punched cards!) into the new program. Users can verify the correctness of their PAM files using a new auxiliary with this command:

mypam .go

2)
the handling of the ASM output streams has been generalized, as demanded for by many people. As a consequence the syntax of the control line +ASM has changed. But the new version has been programmed to handle the simpler forms of the old syntax also.

The auxiliary programs are now easier to use, because they operate directly on PAM files in ordinary text format (.car files), the ``compact binary'' format having been suppressed. The old auxiliaries ylist and yindex reappear as nylist and nyindex . Important new auxiliaries are nydiff and nyshell : nydiff can be used to derive a correction cradle by comparing 2 versions of the same PAM file; nyshell is used with advantage in re-compiling exactly those routines of a whole program or package whose source has changed since the last compilation.



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Next: PAW WWW Home Up: Application Software & Previous: Changes in the



Michel Goossens
CN Division
Tel. 3363
Tue Nov 28 18:14:41 MET 1995