From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Fri Sep 28 2007 - 13:37:49 CDT

Hi,
  Personally, I'm in favor of emitting errors when bad parameters
are detected. We could use to do a lot of work on some of the older
Tcl commands to improve their behavior in cases when bad parameters are
specified. One way we could improve some of these cases is to factor
the command line parsing code for things like timestep ranges into
a single shared implementation so that it's done the same way in all
commands that use frame ranges. That's worth doing in any case, but it's
not high on my TODO list yet due to other pressing projects.

Cheers,
  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Thu, Sep 27, 2007 at 08:35:40PM -0400, Axel Kohlmeyer wrote:
>
> hi all,
>
> i just noticed, that when using the flags "first" or "last"
> with "mol addfile" with non-integer step numbers (in my case
> accidentally due to a stupid bug in my script, but it could
> also happen with computed step numbers without making the result
> explicitely integer) will lead to both of them being completely
> ignored. in my opinion this is the worst of all possible ways of
> handling this situation.
>
> two more reasonable options would be to either a) stop with an
> error message and _require_ integer values or b) round to the
> nearest integer, optionally with a warning.
>
> since this could affect quite a few scripts "out in the wild",
> i'd like to get an opinion from the VMD users and scriptwriters
> here which option they would consider more reasonable.
>
> thanks,
> axel.
>
>
> --
> =======================================================================
> Axel Kohlmeyer akohlmey_at_cmm.chem.upenn.edu http://www.cmm.upenn.edu
> Center for Molecular Modeling -- University of Pennsylvania
> Department of Chemistry, 231 S.34th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6323
> tel: 1-215-898-1582, fax: 1-215-573-6233, office-tel: 1-215-898-5425
> =======================================================================
> If you make something idiot-proof, the universe creates a better idiot.

-- 
NIH Resource for Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics
Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
University of Illinois, 405 N. Mathews Ave, Urbana, IL 61801
Email: johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu                 Phone: 217-244-3349
  WWW: http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/~johns/      Fax: 217-244-6078