[Developers] Uppercase letters in model name

[Ian Taylor]

I'll point out that Ben Bolker raised concerns related to this issue 
over a year ago, where my memory is that he described the behavior as 
something like "case sensitive in the worst way". Ben's document is no 
longer accessible at 
http://people.biology.ufl.edu/bolker/admb-notes.pdf, but I wonder how 
the past year's progress has stacked up against other issues that he 
identified back then.
-Ian

On 11/09/2010 01:57 PM, Arni Magnusson wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Weihai Liu just sent me an email, pointing out an ADMB issue when a 
> model name contains uppercase letters:
>
> * Create a directory containing two files, simple.tpl and simple.dat.
>
> * Rename the files to siMPle.tpl and siMPle.dat.
>
> * Build the model, this will result in a siMPle executable.
>
> * Run the model.
>
> ---
>
> This example highlights two issues:
>
> 1. Just typing 'siMPle' will not run the model in Linux, because the 
> model insists on looking for 'simple.dat' in lowercase. The user will 
> either have to rename the executable, or specify -ind siMPle.dat.
>
> 2. All the output files (simple.cor, simple.par, simple.std, ...) are 
> in lowercase, while the source code, executable, and input file 
> contain uppercase letters. This can cause problems when using 
> automated tools to archive and/or analyze pairs of input and output 
> files.
>
> These issues are minor nuisance, but it's probably easy to change the 
> behavior of ADMB so that the siMPle executable looks for siMPle.dat 
> and writes siMPle.* output files. This line from model7.cpp looks 
> relevant:
>
>   for (int i=1;i<=len;i++) adprogram_name[i]=tolower(adprogram_name[i]);
>
> Spaces in path is asking for trouble, but uppercase letters are 
> usually supported in statistical computing.
>
> Arni
>
>
>
> On Tue, 9 Nov 2010, Weihai Liu wrote:
>
>> Hi Arni,
>>
>> When using your admb.el file on ubuntu, the view report file or view 
>> estimate file or view point estimate menu will report error, "can not 
>> find the file", IF my tpl file had mixed Capital letter in its 
>> filename, see if my tpl is mixBayes.tpl, then the report file will be 
>> all small case mixbayes.rep, the same for .cor, .par etc, so they can 
>> not find it, because the filename had been changed by admb, but 
>> actually the files are there, it is the admb not consistent, the 
>> .htp, .o or .cpp are correct, but all others being forced to use all 
>> small case letter as filename. I only test it for non re.
>>
>> That will not be a problem for windows, and will not be a problem if 
>> the tpl filename is all small case letters, I just let you know to 
>> see if you can fix this either through change your admb.el file or 
>> let the admb fix it. The admb I am using is 64bit for linux.
>>
>> Thank you.
>>
>> Weihai Liu
>>
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