PALP online documentation

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(Documentation for programmers)
(Documentation pages by application)

Revision as of 06:28, 6 May 2012

Among the reactions to the creation of the present Wiki there was the wish for a better documentation of the existing PALP package. In the following an outline of existing documentation and a discussion of what may be aimed for is provided. Finally links to pages corresponding to the various applications are listed. Everyone is invited to share her or his knowledge there.

Documentation for users

PALP's executables are class.x, cws.x, mori.x, nef.x and poly.x. Each of them can be called with '-h' to display help pages listing further options. While '-h' calls the standard help screen, with '-x' (for 'eXperimental', 'eXtended' or perhaps 'eXtreme lack of documentation') one gets lists of further options for class.x, cws.x, nef.x and poly.x. In these help screens every application has a description of just a few words. It would be good to have at least several sentences for every option. For the options listed via 'poly.x -h' such descriptions are given in the original paper (pp. 5-7), and for 'class.x -h' they can be obtained within the help function by typing the corresponding letter. It is among the aims of the pages listed below to provide similar descriptions in other cases.

Documentation for programmers

Currently the only reasonably well documented file in the package is the global header file Global.h which lists global type definitions and routines, including all the routines called by the original version of poly.x. The ideal of documenting everything (including the code) seems utterly unattainable and even the more modest goal of supplying good descriptions of all the structures and routines occurring in all header files is probably beyond what can be achieved. Perhaps it will be possible to provide clear documentation at least for the routines called by the new ('-x') options of poly.x and for the essential routines of the 'nef'-part of the package as listed in Nef.h. As the most important header files correspond to applications (Subpoly.h to class.x, Nef.h to nef.x and Global.h to poly.x) we will include their discussion in the respective documentation pages. Two minor files LG.h and Rat.h are described briefly at the end of the last section of the paper.

Documentation pages by application

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