User:Josiah425:TISEAN Package

TISEAN Package Porting Project

General division and time estimation

Porting of the TISEAN package has a couple parts. First part is making the FORTRAN and c programs accessible to Octave. Second part would be creating makefiles and putting all that code in a neat package. I have divided the first part into three sub-parts:

1. FORTRAN ones that can be re-implemented easily in m-files (a good example of such a program is 'henon')
2. the FORTRAN ones that need to be linked to oct files (an example of such a program is 'project')
3. c programs which also need to be linked to oct files.

As linking FORTRAN code to oct code is most difficult of those three tasks I assume in my estimates that it will take me around 3 hours for each program, there are 28 in this category. Thus I assume it will take me about 2-3 to complete this task.

Next there are the programs in the Tisean package which can be ported to m-files easily. As this is not as difficult a task as linking FORTRAN code to oct files I have allotted 2 hr for each program. I have put 5 programs in this category thus it should only take me about 2 days to complete this task. Last but not least, I have 41 programs in C that need to be linked to Oct files. As this task seems fairly straightforward I have allotted 2 hours for each program. There are 41 programs in this category, therefore this task should also take me 2-3 weeks.

I plan to allot another 2 weeks for cleaning the code up. Therefore, the a grand total is about 7 weeks.

My plan is to tackle the hardest task first, that is to work on the FORTRAN programs that need to be linked to oct files.

There are 9 weeks designated for GSoC so I hope the extra room will allow me easily finish on time.

Explanation of what I want to do with each file

Each FORTRAN file that need to be linked to an Oct file needs work done on it. I plan to take the following steps with each FORTRAN program:

1. Change the FORTRAN program into a subroutine. The arguments of this subroutine will be the parameters that this program would have normally read from the user during execution.
2. Move input parsing and validation from the FORTRAN files to the .cc file which will link the respective fortran file to it. This will make the fortran subroutines 'dumb' and unable to distinguish between good and bad data.
3. Eliminate all file inputs and outputs. The fortran programs write and read data to/from files. This is unnecessary in Octave, as data can be supplied and retrieved to/from these subroutines directly via oct files.
4. Test the oct file against the original library to ensure I didn't make mistakes.

I plan to do similar steps for the c files. I believe this stage will be easier as the c code is much better organized and eliminating input validation & parsing, file inputs and outputs should be a much easier task.