"Remember, all parameters needed for a particular type of prediction MUST be entered before the prediction can be accepted."

Absolutely!

"Computers hate missing values. NEIC tends to leave out mags and sometimes seconds, resulting in a read error. TrueBasic doesn't have fortran's "blank zero" format so 18, ,27 is an error."

Garbage in, garbage out :-) Easy to accommodate c*rap data regardless of language. If it is fixable, fix it, else if assumptions have to be made, dump it.