Program Translation - Nov. 14, 2013

[E.D.G.]

"E.D.G." <edgrsprj at ix.netcom.com> wrote in message 
news:ro-dnch2dPtbRhnPnZ2dnUVZ_rSdnZ2d at earthlink.com...

       The responses regarding that Etgtab program were encouraging.  I was 
not sure if anyone would even recognize the code as the program was written 
quite a while ago.

       The main reason for wanting to translate it into modern language code 
is so that it can be easily modified and also merged with another computer 
program.  The main language it would probably be translated into is True 
BASIC.  This is because the person doing the work is a retired professional 
computer programmer who does work like that as a hobby.  But he will only 
work with True BASIC.  In fact he already translated most of the Etgtab 
program.  The effort got stopped when he could not understand some of the 
FORTRAN code.  Unlike working personnel, retired people can start and stop 
efforts like that as they please.

       From discussions with people in several Newsgroups the conclusions I 
arrived at in the past few weeks are the following:

       Perl would not work because it does calculations too slowly. 
Standard Python would also not work for the same reason.  However, there are 
Python routines available that would make it possible to accelerate the 
calculations.

       FORTRAN, True BASIC, XBasic, and another language called Julia likely 
do calculations fast enough.  Julia looks like it is specifically designed 
for that type of work.

http://julialang.org/

       I am checking with that programmer to see if he wants to continue 
with the effort.

       The program itself has some importance for earthquake related 
research.  A number of years ago I checked with the U.S. Government's "Ask A 
Geologist" staff to see if they knew about any freeware programs that 
researchers could use to generate those types of data.  And I was told that 
they did not know of any.  Apparently they did not even know that Etgtab 
exists.  I had to do some Internet searches to find it.

       The Solid Earth Tide data it generates are probably fairly good.  The 
plan is to check its ocean tide data against data from the following Web 
site to see how well they match.

http://tbone.biol.sc.edu/tide/

       We could not find any good freeware programs for generating the types 
of sun and moon location data needed for this research and so we wrote one 
ourselves.  It has been available for a number of years as a freeware 
program written in True BASIC.