I would instead recommend modifying the documentation to indicate that this
is an archaic option that has not worked out due essentially to the
nonportability of fortran binary i/o. The problem I see with any "little
tool" is the same that we encounter in folks using this stuff - if they
wander around at all, suddenly things don't work. I dinked with figuring
out what was possible here several years ago, and as I recollect, one of the
problems I had was record-based framing of the i/o events that varied
between compilers. So not only do you have cpu architecture to cpu
architecture issues, you have this compiler-dependent framing stuff (this is
a vague memory; if I am a little off, everyone cut me some slack, but I do
have a very firm memory that interoperability was a very sticky problem, and
it was more than just things like what the binary floating point format
looked like, and there is no language specification for this stuff). So
one possibility would be to put something like "use at your own risk due to
portability issues - we have not removed this feature to preserve users'
access to old files" in the doc, and echo the sentiment in the mdout when a
user chooses to write this sort of restrt. Another approach - cut the
ability to write the things now. Cut the ability to read them in two or
three more releases, with warnings being issued. Just my 2 cents. If you
did implement a tool, it would have to read a ntx to know how the data is
framed to then read the data, and you can essentially do the same thing if
you cut off binary write but leave binary read for a couple of releases.
Best Regards - Bob
----- Original Message -----
From: "David A. Case" <case.scripps.edu>
To: <amber-developers.scripps.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, April 02, 2008 3:32 PM
Subject: amber-developers: unformatted restart files
> Does anyone use or need unformatted restart files? Can we nuke them from
> Amber 10? If so, can someone hack up a small unformatted -> formatted
> conversion routine for people that might have the old stuff?
>
> ...thanks!...dave
>
>
Received on Fri Apr 18 2008 - 21:16:20 PDT
