It depends what you use MAD for. MAD9 does not yet provide all the useful
features that MAD8 had. However basic optics calculations, structure design, the
input language and many other things have been implemented in MAD9 in ways which are more
logical, consistent and flexible than in MAD8 and this will meet many needs.
On the other hand, MAD9 does not yet contain beam dynamics with synchrotron radiation,
there are problems with some of the Lie-algebraic calculations (which are more general
than those in MAD8) and quite a few other things.
We are working to improve the situation but users should know that there have been very
few resources, in particular manpower, available to work on MAD9.
A deliberate decision has been made not to include a PLOT command like that of MAD8 in the core MAD9 program. This was created many years ago when the general software landscape was quite different. Nowadays, flexible plotting functionality is provided by many application programs, from spreadsheets to scientific plotting packages and mathematical software environments and there is no need to duplicate them in MAD. Users can use many of these convenient tools to make many kinds of plots using the TFS-format tables output by the LIST and ATTLIST commands. These tables are also intended for processing in many other ways that might previously have been coded into MAD as they arose but are so diverse that they are better handled externally.
A fully interactive graphical user interface for MAD9, going far beyond the idea of a plotting command, is under development by Tech-X.
With the present MAD9, plots in the MAD8 style are possible via the DOOM database.
MAD Version 9 allows you to define your own startup file. This is just any input file that you want to be read automatically by MAD9 when it starts up. This file is entirely optional; you don't need to have one. Typical uses for this file are
In Unix versions of MAD9 up to now the startup file had to be called .mad and located in the user's home directory (so it was usually a hidden file). The Windows and Macintosh Version 9.51 require it to be called init.mad and located in the working folder (directory).
In future the file will be called init.mad on all systems and we plan to make the behaviour equivalent on all systems.
Here is an example of an init.mad file to get you started.
A number of people have noticed that it is becoming difficult to access the MAD Home Page
via the old URL: http://wwwslap.cern.ch/mad/
In conformity with official CERN Web policy, the recommended address for the MAD Home Page is now either of the three equivalent addresses
http://cern.ch/mad
http://home.cern.ch/mad/
http://mad.home.cern.ch/mad/
In fact this new address leads to exactly the same files as the old "wwwslap" address does when it is working but it may not continue to do so in future. At present, the links from this page to the documentation for MAD Version 8 may lead to URLs of the form
http://wwwslap.cern.ch/fci/mad/ ........
that I do not have access to in order to change. Most of these should still work if you manually change the string "wwwslap" to "home" in the URL field of your Web browser.
The "wwwslap" address will probably continue to work for some time. Nevertheless if you have links to the MAD home page in any of your own Web pages, your Favorites collection or anywhere else, please update them now.
The following links are to older FAQs and may need to be updated.