Poly/ML September 2003

polyml@lists.polyml.org

5 participants
4 discussions

Some beginner's installation questions and comments
by john＠cs.york.ac.uk 30 Sep '03

30 Sep '03

1. I wish to install Poly/ML 4.1.3 on Linux. Since we don't usually install from RPMs, I first downloaded and unpacked the tar file of the binary release. With the files in a single directory, ./polyml worked fine: $ ls -l total 4152 -rwxr-xr-x 1 john staff 3653632 Sep 30 15:48 DB413Release lrwxrwxrwx 1 john staff 12 Sep 30 15:48 ML_dbase -> DB413Release -rwxr-xr-x 1 john staff 586235 Sep 30 2002 poly $ ./poly Poly/ML RTS version I386-4.1.3 (13:57:33 Sep 30 2002) Copyright (c) 2002 CUTS and contributors. Running with heap parameters (h=10240K,ib=2048K,ip=100%,mb=6144K,mp=20%) Mapping ./ML_dbase Poly/ML 4.1.3 Release > but when I tried placing the DB413Release database file (and its symbolic link ML_dbase) in a) /usr/local/lib/poly and b) /usr/lib/poly. (Experiment shows me that the search path is: .:/usr/local/lib/poly:/usr/lib/poly - it would be good if the web page http://www.polyml.org/download.html mentioned this under "Tar-ed archives".) I found that DB413Release had to be writeable (nothing to do with where I put it, of course, just the file permissions I used): $ ./poly Poly/ML RTS version I386-4.1.3 (13:57:33 Sep 30 2002) Copyright (c) 2002 CUTS and contributors. Running with heap parameters (h=10240K,ib=2048K,ip=100%,mb=6144K,mp=20%) WARNING:/usr/local/lib/poly/ML_dbase: Write permission denied. WARNING:/usr/local/lib/poly/ML_dbase: Opened for reading only. Mapping /usr/local/lib/poly/ML_dbase Poly/ML 4.1.3 Release > Does this matter? If so, if the database must be generally writeable, I think that this is rather unfortunate. 2. I'd really like to be able to put the database somewhere else. (We have the convention of placing installations of application software in version-specific sub-directories of /usr/local/pkg - e.g. PKG= /usr/local/pkg/polyml-$VERSION/, and any library files in ./lib.) In order to do this, I recompiled from source. One aspect of this wasn't immediately obvious to me. Perhaps the web page http://www.polyml.org/download.html should say "You may alter the DEFAULT_POLYPATH assignment in driver/configure to indicate where you will place the DB413Release file and the link ML_dbase." before "To build the poly binary download the driver, unpack it and then type: cd driver; ./configure; make Then, after "Then run poly ML_dbase < mlsource/BuildAll.sml", add: "Finally, copy DB413Release into the directory you have specified in the driver/configure file and link DB413Release to ML_dbase. The poly(1) command should locate it. There is no need to copy anything else from the source." (If the last is true!) 3. There are no Unix manual pages for Poly/ML, either for the command or for the library routines. I'd write some, but I think the developers will know best what to write. The Linux manual page man(7) explains the format best, I've found. John A. Murdie Department of Computer Science University of York

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Apparent bug in String.tokenize
by byron.hale＠einfo.com 10 Sep '03

10 Sep '03

Hi all, Please forgive the previous posting without data. I've been doing some get-out-the-vote work in California's famous democratic election, still scheduled for October 7th. As part of this work I have been using PolyML to tokenize voter record strings. I thought that we could not only surpass Florida, but even Canada's overnight hand counted vote. However, I am beginning to have my doubts. To my shock, some tokenizations from repeated token separators dropped fields which I believe should have resulted in empty strings. Are my expectations reasonable, or have I subtly misinterpreted the use of String.tokenize? Note that the field that would convey whether Miss Maxwell's male counterpart was a Sr, Jr, II, III, XIV, etc, has been dropped, making the results unsuitable for reading into an RDBMS, for example. Also, at the end, following the token "General," is the token "\n," when I believe there should be several empty strings inbetween. Thanks, Byron Hale Sample input/output follows, with data altered to protect the voter. (This time with data.:) val voter = "Miss\tMaxwell\tMaria\tElaine\t\t2323 Fremont St \tSanta Clara\tCA\t95050\t2323 Fremont St \tSanta Clara CA 95050\t(408)555-3323\tGeneral\t\t\t\t\t\t\n"; String.tokens(fn ch => (#"\t" = ch)) voter; val it = ["Miss", "Maxwell", "Maria", "Elaine", "2323 Fremont St ", "Santa Clara", "CA", "95050", "2323 Fremont St ", "Santa Clara CA 95050", "(408)555-3323", "General", "\n"] : String.string list

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Apparent bug in String.tokenize
by byron.hale＠einfo.com 10 Sep '03

10 Sep '03

Hi all, I've been doing some get-out-the-vote work in California's famous democratic election, still scheduled for October 7th. As part of this work I have been using using PolyML to tokenize voter record strings. I thought that we could not only surpass Florida, but even Canada's overnight hand counted vote. However, I am beginning to have my doubts. To my shock, some tokenizations from repeated token separators dropped fields which I believe should have resulted in empty strings. Are my expectations reasonable, or have I subtly misinterpreted the use of String.tokenize? Thanks, Byron Hale Sample input/output follows, with data altered to protect the voter.

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Disabling "Warning - Increasing stack" message
by David.Aspinall＠ed.ac.uk 03 Sep '03

03 Sep '03

I'm communicating with a PolyML program over stdin/stdout, and the "Increasing stack" messages were gettiong in the way. They are currently sent on stdout, but I believe they should be sent to stderr (or there should be the possibility of switching off warning messages altogether). Thanks to PolyML being open source, it was easy to make a small patch to processes.c in the driver to achieve output on stderr. David Matthews suggested I post it here in case it is of interest to others. I hope the patch may be integrated (or improved upon) in a later release. - David Aspinall. [da@montague driver]$ diff -c processes.c~ processes.c *** processes.c~ 2001-11-05 11:16:33.000000000 +0000 --- processes.c 2003-09-01 23:33:44.000000000 +0100 *************** *** 503,511 **** if (new_len >= (1 << 16)) { ! proper_printf("Warning - Increasing stack from %d to %d bytes\n", old_len * sizeof(word), new_len * sizeof(word)); ! proper_fflush(stdout); } /* Must make a new frame and copy the data over. */ --- 503,511 ---- if (new_len >= (1 << 16)) { ! proper_fprintf(stderr,"Warning - Increasing stack from %d to %d bytes\n", old_len * sizeof(word), new_len * sizeof(word)); ! proper_fflush(stderr); } /* Must make a new frame and copy the data over. */ -- David Aspinall <David.Aspinall(a)ed.ac.uk> School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh

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Poly/ML September 2003