Yorick is an interactive programming language for scientific computing that includes scientific visualization functions, and text and binary I/O functions geared to millions of numbers.
Yorick is open source software, under a BSD license. Yorick runs under UNIX, MacOS X (X windows), and MS Windows. You can find many yorick resources online:
- Home pages at yorick.github.com and yorick.sourceforge.net, including the user manual and extensive documentation.
- User forums at yorick.sourceforge.net.
- Browse or download sourcecode at github.com/dhmunro/yorick.
- Read end of Quick start section below on running yorick demo programs.
Files in the regexp/ subdirectory are the work of Guido van Rossum and Henry Spencer; read the files for details. The latter is Copyright (c) 1986 by University of Toronto.
Files in the fft directory are C translations of the Swarztrauber fortran FFTPACK routines. Files in the matrix directory are C translations of the fortran LAPACK routines. The original fortran is available from netlib.org.
On most UNIX-like systems (including Linux and MacOS X), you can build yorick by changing to the top level directory of the source distribution and typing:
make install
This will create a subdirectory relocate/ in the source tree. The yorick executable is relocate/bin/yorick. You can move the relocate/ directory wherever you want (the name "relocate" is unimportant), but any changes in the relative locations of the files therein will prevent yorick from starting correctly. You can, of course, softlink to the yorick executable from wherever you like, or exec yorick from a shell script outside its relocate/ directory. The relocate/ directory is organized as follows:
relocate/ files required for building compiled packages, and:
bin/ binary executables
lib/ binary libraries for compiled packages
include/ header files for compiled package APIs
i0/ interpreted code required for yorick to start
i/ optional interpreted code libraries
i-start/ interpreted code that autoloads at startup
g/ graphics style files, palettes, and templates
doc/ documentation files
To build a tarball containing a yorick executable, type instead:
make relocatable
This creates a tarball yorick-V.N-RR.tgz containing the yorick code, interpreted library, and documentation. Move it to the directory where you wish to install yorick, then unpack it with:
gzip -dc yorick-V.N-RR.tgz | tar xvf -
The yorick executable will be yorick-V.N-RR/bin/yorick. Read yorick-V.N-RR/README for more information.
To build yorick on a MS Windows machine, read win/README.
Yorick is a command line program; you need to run it in a terminal window. You will want command line recall and editing. If your terminal window does not support that, you can either run yorick under emacs (see the emacs/ directory in the source), or you can get a readline wrapper like rlwrap.
If you need some test programs to run, you can try the demos. Start yorick and type:
include, "demo3.i"
demo3
The demo3 runs a simulation of a chaotic pendulum (it will stop after about a minute). Yorick functions generally have documentation which you can read in the terminal using the help command:
help, demo3
The help message includes the path to the source file, which you can open and read with any text editor, to find out exactly how demo3 works (or any other yorick interpreted command). There are five demo programs (demo1 through demo5). You can also do a comprehensive test of your yorick installation by typing:
include, "testfull.i"
The top-level distribution directory contains this README, scripts for configuring and building yorick, and a number of subdirectories. Some subdirectories contain core parts of yorick; others are extras which you might reasonably omit. Here's a quick roadmap:
play/ (portability layer)
here are event loop, low level io, graphics primitives
everything else is supposed to be strictly architecture-independent
(however, other non-core packages may slightly violate this rule)
win/ (MS Windows specific files)
here are the MS Visual C++ project files
some Windows code is in subdirectories like play/win
gist/
play-based 2D scientific visualization library
yorick/
yorick language interpreter (C source)
matrix/
LAPACK linear algebra functions (C source)
math/
non-matrix mathematical functions (C source)
fft/
Swartztrauber Fast Fourier Transform (C source)
i/
library of interpreted functions
i0/
interpreted code required at startup
i-start/
interpreted code run at startup, usually containing autoloads
extend/
sample trivial compiled extension for yorick
mpy/
MPI-based yorick multiprocessing package
drat/
compiled extension to do 2D cylindrical radiation transport
hex/
compiled extension to do 3D radiation transport
doc/
documentation: yorick user manual, quick reference cards
emacs/
GNU Emacs lisp code for running yorick and editing yorick source
distribs/
files for creating RedHat RPM, FreeBSD, and other distributions
debian/
instructions for creating Debian .deb distribution
You can take up to four steps to configure, build, test, and install yorick. In order, the four separate commands are:
make config
make
make check
make install
Yorick requires an ANSI C compiler and libraries, some POSIX standard functions (plus either poll or select, which are not covered by any standard, but are present on all UNIX systems), and the basic X11 library (R4 might work, but anything R5 or better should certainly work). However, these components may be misinstalled or installed in places where the configuration process cannot find them. If so, you can either fix your system or edit the files Make.cfg and play/unix/config.h by hand to repair any errors or oversights of "make config".
The "make config" step creates the file Make.cfg (in this top-level directory). By default, the compiler and loader flags are just "-O". If you want fancier options, you can edit Make.cfg before you build; just modify the Y_CFLAGS and/or Y_LDFLAGS variable. Optimization flags like -g or -O are handled separately; use the COPT_DEFAULT variable to set those.
Instead of editing Make.cfg by hand after the "make config" step, you can also set a variety of environment variables to control the configuration process. You can read the configuration scripts -- configure, play/unix/config.sh, play/x11/xconfig.sh, and yorick/yconfig.sh -- to find out precisely what they do. Here they are, with sample non-default values:
CC='xlc -q64' # C compiler name plus overall mode switch
CFLAGS=-g # compile flags (-O is default)
LDFLAGS=-g # load flags (optimization CFLAGS is default)
AR='ar -X 64' # ar archive program
RANLIB='ranlib -X 64' # ranlib archive indexer
MATHLIB=-lmcompat # math library (-lm is default)
FPU_IGNORE=yes # give up trying to catch floating point exceptions
NO_PLUGINS=yes # build yorick with no plugin support
LD_STATIC=yes # force hex and drat packages to be statically loaded
NO_PASSWD=yes # hack for crippled OSes or crosscompilers (catamount)
NO_CUSERID=yes # hack for crippled OSes or crosscompilers (catamount)
NO_PROCS=yes # build yorick with no subprocess or poll/select support
(catamount) - this cripples yorick event handling
NO_POLL=yes # forces use of select when poll present but broken
(Mac OS X uses this by default)
NO_XLIB=yes # build yorick with no onscreen graphics
X11BASE=/weird/X11root # try -I/weird/X11root/include, and
-L/weird/X11root/lib
X11INC=/weird/X11root/include # directory containing X11/Xlib.h
X11LIB=/weird/X11root/lib # directory containing libX11.a or .so
Other make targets include:
clean -- get rid of the mess left over from the build
do this after successful install
distclean -- clean plus all files generated by the config step
config does distclean before it begins
siteclean -- distclean plus resets ysite.sh to original settings
uninstall -- gets rid of all installed files
be sure to do uninstall before distclean if you want to
get rid of the yorick you installed (otherwise you will
need to make ysite again)
There are many more build targets and make macros. Read the comments in Makefile and Makepkg for more information.