[Developers] Uppercase letters in model name

[John Sibert]

Path and case issues are longstanding. Although most of us have been 
able to achieve livable work arounds, it might be worth the effort to 
rationalize them a bit.  Arni is correct - putting spaces in paths is 
risky behavior.

It would be great to see Ben's issue list and compare it with what has 
been going on over the last 2 years. I suspect we have been addressing 
other issues (eg getin rid of "generic" code, porting to different 
compilers, simplifying installation, ...). Perhaps Ben could resurrect 
the document.

John

On 11/09/2010 12:17 PM, Ian Taylor wrote:
> 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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-- 
John Sibert
Emeritus Researcher, SOEST
University of Hawaii at Manoa

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