Scientists Helper User Guide

Scientist's Helper User's Manual MacIntosh Version 2.4 for the 512K MacIntosh and Mac XL by William Menke College of Oceanography Oregon State University Corvallis OR 97331 (503) 754-2912 January 4, 1986 A Data Manipulation program designed especially for Scientists and Engineers for performing arithmetic, curve fitting and time series analysis on tabular data Introduction. Scientist's Helper is an interactive data manipulator designed for the kind of tabular data commonly used by scientists and engineers. The fundamental data structure in Scientist's Helper is a table of numbers. These data can be input, saved as files, viewed, plotted, and operated upon mathematically. p Scientist's Helper is basically a command string oriented program. The command set includes graphics, arithmetic, time-series analysis, curve fitting and table management operations. p Scientist's Helper makes full use of the MacIntosh windowing and menu selection functions. For instance, it contains a mouse-driven table editor to facilitate inputing, viewing, and manipulating the table. p The contents of the table can be plotted on the Mac screen and then saved as a MacPaint format file. p Procedures (programs) can be written in RegTab's command language and then executed as if they were Scientist's Helper commands. These procedures can use string variables and a variety of control structures. The Scientist's Helper Table. A Scientist's Helper table can contain up to 4096 rows and 32 columns of single-precision floating-point data. In addition to the usual numbers, table entries can be set to NaN (for not a number). Improper mathematical operations such as division by zero will generate these entries. Thus, Scientist's Helper will not crash from an arithmetic error. Scientist's Helper tables come in two variations. One type is 'interpolated', meaning that the data in column 1 increase linearly with row number. Entries in column 1 of interpolated tabes cannot be altered. The other type is uninter- polated, in which column 1 is no different than any other column. Interpolated tables require less disk storage than uninterpolated ones. A header is associated with the table. The header contains the basic information about the table, and is stored along with the table when a file containing a table is created. The header contains the following information, which are referred to by standard names: rows: the number of rows in the table; cols: the number of columns in the table; title: an 80 character string describing the data; interpolated: a boolean flag indicating whether or not the table is interpolated; colname: a 10 character name for each column; samp, start: the sampling interval and…