Hi EQF;

> One of the major reasons that so little progress has been made in the field of earthquake forecasting is because people are spending large amounts of time arguing about the subject matter instead of focusing on making progress. I don’t have time to waste on arguing with people.

That's because time spent on false premises is wasted time, so it's better to get that decided first.

> However, I am talking by E-mail with a fairly respectable groups of serious earthquake forecasting researchers around the world.

Is that one way or two way communication?

> My research has also been discussed in international new forums etc.

You mean like sci.geo.earthquakes? LOL!

> There were two reasons I had to stop the True Basic program development efforts. First, I had to begin work on several other projects that I consider to be even more important than earthquake forecasting. I am trying to get one of them finished at the moment and when done will be sending information regarding it to top U.S. government personnel. I expect that it will raise some eyebrows in high places.

My work wasn't taking up any of your time except in email.

> Second, my Perl program began to evolve so rapidly that it was impossible to make current versions available for translation. And it is still rapidly evolving.

How long does it take to send an attachment? Weak excuse.

> One feature that I really like is the ability to make changes to the program while it is actually running. I do that by having the main program jump to a second, short program that simply watches for a key entry. When a key is pressed it recompiles the original program and begins running again at the same exit point from that program. All of the data and variables etc. remain active in memory.

Now THAT would be handy!

> And if I made a programming error as is frequently the case, the original program will not recompile. Instead the second program generates an error message and returns to waiting for a key entry. All of the data still remain active in memory. This feature is so valuable because it takes my original program quite a while to do the startup calculations and array organization. And with this feature I can instruct it to dramatically change the way data are printed or stored in files etc. without the necessity of having the program go through all of the calculations again.

VERY nice!

> I need to learn how to produce charts directly from Perl and also create copies of the program which will run without being compiled. Perl will do both. I just don’t have time to learn how. If you would like to be helpful you might see if you can determine how to do those things.

I would, but I just don't have time to learn a new language. Especially Perl...

> The first step is to learn how to unzip Perl tar.gz module files and merge them with the Perl program. I still don’t know exactly how to do that.

That's a Linux compressed archive. I don't think you can do it in Windows.

> However, I know that you are not especially fond of Perl. I did check on X-Basic but decided not to use it even though I would probably like it quite a bit more than Perl.

Thet's Skywise's language of choice. There's an active version of it too. XBLite I think.

> The Perl language has the advantages that it is supported by a company – ActiveState. So there won’t be any application errors or viruses getting into it. And it is a free download from them.

Free is always nice.

> Getting back to earthquakes, make sure you read my new Afghanistan earthquake EarthWaves entry.

OK.

Roger