OpenBUGS program has a pre-compiled )S library from MS Windows. Any possibility to package it?

[Paul Johnson]

On Tue, Jun 14, 2011 at 7:57 PM, Kevin Kofler <kevin.kofler at chello.at> wrote:
> Kevin Kofler wrote:
>> In this case, the most obvious candidates would probably be
>> FreePascal/Lazarus and GPC, but porting to a completely different, more
>> commonly used language (I'd suggest C++) might also be worth considering
>> for upstream (depending on how hard it is to port to a Free Pascal
>> compiler).
>
> Actually, maybe this can help: http://cp-dev.sourceforge.net/ (but it's 32-
> bit-x86-only and it might not be complete enough to build OpenBUGS yet, plus
> I still wonder why the .obc source files contain that binary metadata in
> addition to the Pascal-like code).
>
>        Kevin Kofler
>

Thanks for the link. I did not know about that project yet, but it
does point over to the OpenBUGS site.

I agree with you it is a bit weird that the BUGS source code is
wrapped into those binary odc files.  The most favorable
interpretation I can give this is that it is a form of literate
programming, where the code is wrapped into documentation and so
forth.

To the ODC haters: I agree, but...

This *is* an open source project, if you have the right editor.  I ran
the free BlackBox program inside Wine just now. Putting code into ODC
files is not conceptually different from wrapping a CPP program into
LaTeX source code, or wrapping R code into an Rnw file. The fact that
the code is not just a flat ascii file you can read with Emacs does
not make it less open.

I will try to find out the historical reasons for relying on BlackBox.
 That decision was made in 1996 or so, and if you remember the state
of the world then, the g++ did not work very well and there were
competing/incomplete versions of the standard template library.  Java
did not exist, and Pascal was just about as widely used as C (moreso
in the classroom).  A lot of the bigger scientific programming
projects of that era avoided C++. The other project with which I was
intimately familiar is Swarm, which adopted Objective-C as its
language, mostly for the same reasons.

pj



> --



-- 
Paul E. Johnson
Professor, Political Science
1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504
University of Kansas