Re: compilation problem with module function interface definition

In article
<X8mce.161603$cg1.146661@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
"James Giles" <jamesgiles@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Trying to second-guess the meaning of a numerical value is not
> a very good approach to preserving information. The best approach
> is to avoid losing the information in the first place.

Amen to that! You've obliquely hit on one of my pet peeves in a part of
my work that has little directly to do with Fortran. I am forever
"fighting" with data processing systems that "help" the analysis of
flight data by changing the data in some way. It seems that a major part
of some of my data analysis work often involves figuring out exactly
what the prior steps of data processing have done to the data... so that
I can undo it and get back to the original. (This, among other things,
ended up driving me into writing some of those data processing systems;
it was easier to rewrite the upstream system than to patch up things
after the existing system had savaged the information I needed.)

I most commonly run into this in regards to time-tagging of data. It
doesn't turn out to be very much use to me to know, for example, that
one of the flight instruments output a value of precisely 1.23, no
matter how accurate that value might be, if I don't know precisely when
that measurement was taken. Sure, the aircraft had a roll rate of
precisely 1.23 degrees per second at some point in time; I could have
figured that much out without the instrumentation; I want to know *WHEN*
it had that roll rate. :-( That information was in the data stream at
one point, but it often gets "helpfully" reorganized in a way that
requires much work to reconstruct the original (particularly in the
presence of data dropouts and other difficulties of the real world.)

So the details of the problem are different than those described here,
but I see a common underlying thread in that perfectly fine original
data is getting corrupted in the name of cleaning it up. Sometimes the
data had enough redundancy that you can adequately reconstruct things
with enough work. But other times, the information is just lost forever.

--
Richard Maine | Good judgment comes from experience;
email: my first.last at org.domain | experience comes from bad judgment.
org: nasa, domain: gov | -- Mark Twain
.