Tela Frequently Asked Questions This list is not necessarily up to date. The most recent Tela version may actually have more capabilities than stated in this file. SYNTACTIC ANNOYANCES Q1.1: Why does "if (a[i]>=0)..." not work? Q1.2: How do I get the imaginary unit? Variable i has no value. Q1.3: Why does it complain about syntax error near else-statement? Q1.4: How to build a matrix of all clone rows? Q1.5: How to place a doublequote in a string? Q1.6: How to take a columnwise mean, max, sum or min of a matrix? Q1.7: How to form the outer product of two vectors? Q1.8: How to build a string matrix? Q1.9: How to run Tela in batch mode? Q1.10: How do I link .ct files dynamically during runtime? Q1.11: How to check about the latest version of Tela? Q1.12: I am an old Matlab programmer. How do I switch to Tela? OBSCURE ERROR SITUATIONS Q2.1: Why do I see the stupid error message 'Undefined function '? Q2.2: I use eval to assign to a variable, but afterwards the variable seems to be undefined. Q2.3: I use import to read some file but the variables aren't there! Q2.4: Why does map function complain that the first argument is not a function? Q2.5: It complains that sign is undefined! I thought it is a standard function! Q2.6: The stddev function gives slightly different result as std in Matlab? Q2.7: I corrected an error, and now the plot does not appear. Q2.8: My X-server gives BadAlloc errors when I try to open more plot windows. Q2.9: Sometimes doing vector+matrix seems to work, otherwise it gives error message. Q2.10: On SGI, my Tela executable grows and grows. Is there a memory leak? Q2.11: Comparing a zero-length vector and a scalar gives a null vector. MISCELLANEOUS Q3.1: Which file formats can Tela read/write? GNUS CAN BE QUITE A GNUISANCE Q4.1: Why do I get a core dump when trying to source a program? Q4.2: I get a core dump. Should I report it? Q4.3: It gives me wrong results, what should I look at first? ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS SYNTACTIC ANNOYANCES Q1.1: Why does "if (a[i]>=0)..." not work? Because "]>" is special operator in Tela, the right bracket for mapped indexing. See "help mapped". Insert space between ] and >. The m2t translator should be fixing this automatically now. Q1.2: How do I get the imaginary unit? Variable i has no value. Use the notation 1i for the imaginary unit, 0.5+2i etc. for general complex numbers, 0i for complex zero. The "i" here is syntactically part of the number, not a variable name. In this way the variable "i" may be used for other purposes, such as loop indexing. Q1.3: Why does it complain about syntax error near else-statement? Unlike C, Tela does not allow a semicolon before 'else'. You must write if (condition) statement-1 // <---- OK else statement-2; and not if (condition) statment-1; // <---- THIS IS IN ERROR!!! else statement-2; You can, however, use braces: if (condition) { statement-1; } else { statement-2; }; but then you must remember the semicolon at the end, too. Lesson: The use of semicolons is Pascal-like and everything else is C-like. See 'help if'. HOW-TO OF THE LANGUAGE Q1.4: How to build a matrix of all clone rows? Assume you have a vector V = #(1,2,3), and you want to build matrix M: M = #(1, 2, 3; 1, 2, 3; 1, 2, 3; 1, 2, 3; 1, 2, 3); First create matrix A as A = #(V). Then M = A[ones(5),:]. Q1.5: How to place a doublequote in a string? Use backslash before the doublequote. The method of quoting things is identical with C. Q1.6: How to take a columnwise mean, max, sum or min of a matrix? Version>=1.2: Use mean(x,d), sum(x,d) etc. to apply the operation along dth dimension. Version<1.2: Use the map functional. Say map(mean,A,1) or map(mean,A,2) to take mean along first or second dimension, respectively. Two points must be noted: 1) The functional argument (mean) must be declared global in the enclosing function or package, if any, 2) you cannot use intrinsic functions. Examples of intrinsic functions: min, max, abs. Workaround is to declare auxiliary functions: function y=min1(x) {y=min(x)}. Limitation (2) will probably go away in some future version of Tela. Q1.7: How to form the outer product of two vectors? If V and U are vectors of length N, their outer product V times U can be formed as reshape(V,N,1)**reshape(U,1,N). Q1.8: How to build a string matrix? There are two ways. The first method uses the function strmat or strmat2. Function strmat is used if you want to compose a string matrix out of a fixed small number of explicit strings. The function does zero padding for you automatically. Function strmat2 can be used to parse a string matrix out of a single long string using specified characters as separators. In this way it is possible to turn e.g. a complete text file returned by function run to a string matrix. The second method is to use a loop as follows: M = tostring(izeros(N,L)); // N is number of string, L is their length for (i=1; i<=N; i++) M[i,:] = /* expression returning ith string */; All strings must have equal length in this example. OTHER HOW-TO Q1.9: How to run Tela in batch mode? Say: batch $output_file Q1.10: How do I link .ct files dynamically during runtime? On Linux with DLD library: Compile it normally using telakka -c myfile.ct to produce myfile.o. Then call link("myfile.o") from Tela and you are done! On machines with ELF DSO (dynamic shared objects), e.g. SGI: Again compile it normally first, saying telakka -c myfile.ct. Then say ld -o myfile.so -shared myfile.o to turn it to DSO file. From Tela, you can now link("myfile.so"). Easier way for Tela version >=1.23: telakka --shared myfile.ct Q1.11: How to check about the latest version of Tela? Look at http://www.geo.fmi.fi/prog/tela.html and point at "Change log". Q1.12: I am an old Matlab programmer. How do I switch to Tela? There are three kinds of tools available for Matlab interfacing. First, you can load Matlab ASCII and binary files (MAT-files) using the import and import1 commands. The function export_matlab performs the reverse operation, i.e. it saves your Tela variables in Matlab- readable binary file. With these functions it is possible and easy to e.g. transfer all workspace variables from Matlab to Tela and back again. Of course, more than two-dimensional arrays have trouble translating to Matlab :-) Second, you can translate your existing Matlab programs to Tela using m2t. The success of this depends on what kind of Matlab code you have. Sometimes a 100-line script translates and runs in Tela with no problems at all, but usually you must do some hand editing. Anyway, using m2t should always be much faster than purely manual translation. Third, if you have the matlabeng module installed within Tela, you can call Matlab functions and do Matlab evaluations directly from Tela. For example, if Tela is missing some special function or some linear algebra subroutine, e.g. QR decomposition, you would typically send mail to tela-suggestions@fmi.fi about it, but in the meantime you can get along by calling the missing function from Matlab. OBSCURE ERROR SITUATIONS Q2.1: Why do I see the stupid error message 'Undefined function '? You are calling an undefined function. Ideally Tela should be able to report its name, but currently it isn't. However, usually there are not many possible undefined function calls on one source line. Q2.2: I use eval to assign to a variable, but afterwards the variable seems to be undefined. The builtin function eval works in global context. All symbols appearing in the evaluated string refer to globally visible names. If you are calling eval from within a function, you must declare those variables global in the function header which you want to access in the evaluation string. The same is true with load, save, import and export_matlab (see below). Q2.3: I use import to read some file but the variables aren't there! See above. You are probably calling import within a function, and the imported variables go to the global context. You must declare the variables global in the function you are calling import from. Q2.4: Why does map function complain that the first argument is not a function? If you didn't misspell the function name, the reason is probably that you didn't declare it global in the enclosing function or package scope. Tela understands that f is a function if it is called in the usual way, e.g. f(x), but now f is an argument, map(f,A,d), and Tela interprets f as a local variable unless explicitly declared global by some means. Q2.5: It complains that sign is undefined! I thought it is a standard function! You are using a package aren't you. You are probably also using 'sign' as a variable or formal parameter name in some of the package's functions. If so, it links 'sign' to a symbol private to the package, not the external version. When writing a package, you can use a standard function name as a variable names only if the function is not called in any of the functions in your package. Using standard function names as variable names is confusing anyway, so please avoid it. Q2.6: The stddev function gives slightly different result as std in Matlab? In Tela, stddev divides by N whereas in Matlab std divides by N-1. Should be insignificant for normal uses. Q2.7: I corrected an error, and now the plot does not appear. If you encounter an error (or press Control-C) inside hold(on)...hold(off), the hold(on) stays "on". Try saying hold(off) until the plot appears. hold(on) and hold(off) increase and decrease an internal counter, and to undo the effect of previous hold(off)'s you must say hold(on) an equal number of times. Q2.8: My X-server gives BadAlloc errors when I try to open more plot windows. Your X-server probably runs out of memory. PlotMTV can use three methods for redrawing graphics windows: (1) It redraws everything from scratch. This does not use any extra memory, but is potentially slow. (2) It uses an X-Pixmap to store the contents of the window. The pixmaps are stored on the server local memory. This is the default, and it gives a fast redraw. (3) It relies on the backing store mechanism of the X-server. This also uses the X-server memory, and it gives a fast redraw. To disable pixmaps, give the command pixmap(off). You can put this in your $HOME/.telainit.t file. After pixmaps are disabled, it uses backing store if it is available or renders from scratch. On some X-terminals the pixmap method leads to memory exhaustion far more early than backing store. How to enable backing store depends on what kind of X-server you are using. The problem with backing store is that PlotMTV does not actually ask for backing store, but it queries if backing store is available. On most X-servers this means that you have to turn backing store on for every window in order to have it on for PlotMTV windows. For this reason the pixmaps method is the default. To summarize, in order to have fast redraws you must have some scratch memory available in your X-server. Then you can choose between the pixmap method and the backing store method. If you run out of memory with both methods, you must turn both pixmaps and backing store off. In this case there should never be a problem of a window not opening, but the redraws may be painfully slow if the plot is a complicated one. Q2.9: Sometimes doing vector+matrix seems to work, otherwise it gives error message. This is a really obscure point, but hopefully rarely encountered. The main rule is that in A+B, both A and B should have the same dimensions. An exception is that adding vector and higher-rank array is allowed if both have the same length(), i.e., the same number of data elements. A problem arises, however, what should be the type of the result, should it be a vector or a higher-rank array? The current Tela resolution is to make statements like A+=B never change the type of A. However this has the side effect that A+B may be of type vector or matrix, depending on what kind of expressions A and B are, and furthermore B+A is probably different. The type of the result depends on how Tela actually generates the code, and is thus beyond user control. The fix is to use flatten() around A or B as appropriate to turn it to a vector explicitly. This practice may change in the future. If you want to play safe, do arithmetic operations only on strictly compatible array types. Q2.10: On SGI, my Tela executable grows and grows. Is there a memory leak? Try the binaries compiled with g++. The version compiled with SGI's own CC sometimes cannot free memory optimally. If this is a bug, I would say it is in the SGI compiler not in Tela. The g++ version should be about equally fast as the CC version. Another hint: You can effectively deallocate the memory used by an array variable by assigning the VOID value to it: a = :; The variable is still visible in the whos() list but does not take up memory. Q2.11: Comparing a zero-length vector and a scalar gives a null vector. There is nothing wrong with this except that Matlab gives 1 in such a case. We just have to live with these small differences. MISCELLANEOUS Q3.1: Which file formats can Tela read/write? Reading: HDF (SDS), various ASCII, Matlab binary. Writing: HDF (SDS), Matlab binary, any ASCII by using fprintf or fformat. Tela>=1.2 also writes 8-bit HDF raster images. GNUS CAN BE QUITE A GNUISANCE Q4.1: Why do I get a core dump when trying to source a program? This really should be fixed, but sometimes when Tela gets too confused by your input it core dumps. Check that your parentheses match, check also that you use "string" and not 'strings'. Q4.2: I get a core dump. Should I report it? If you get it during execution of a program, you definitely should report it. If you get it in parsing phase, you also may report it if it occurs frequently and repeatably and you just can't stand it any more. Q4.3: It gives me wrong results, what should I look at first? Check possible overflows of integer variables. Tela does not check for any overflows, it behaves like C or Fortran in this respect. For example, if you assign T=2000 and then compute T^4 (as in Stefan- Boltzmann law) you get a wrong result on most platforms. Use explicit decimal point, T=2000.0 . Use whos() to see the types of your variables.