!ERR and MPFIT

[Craig Markwardt <craigmnet(at)cow.physics.wisc.edu>]

When I set out to translate MPFIT from MINPACK, I wanted to stay as
faithful as possible, but I also wanted it to be as simple as
possible.  When it came to error handling, I wanted the user's model
routine to be able to report an error condition.

Unfortunately I chose to use the !ERR system variable.  If !ERR is set
to a negative number, then MPFIT aborts the run, assuming that there
was an unrecoverable error.

I now realize that using !ERR was probably a mistake.  Why?  RSI seems
to want to make it obsolete.  Through their error-handling flavor of
the month program, !ERR seems to have fallen out of favor.  Also,
there are quite a few actions which might set !ERR accidentally in the
user's function without actually signalling an error condition.

So I have two questions:

 * to people who use MPFIT: does anybody actually use the !ERR status
   variable to control the fitting process?  If not, then I would
   consider removing it.

 * to everybody: any suggestions on how to generically signal an error
   condition?  My thoughts were:

     - ERROR keyword variable - don't like this, since then the
       function has to accept keywords

     - define a new system variable - don't like this either, since
       it's hard to do system variables right

     - common block variable - not very pretty, but gets the job done.

To be clear, this is some kind of error flag that a user routine would
(optionally!) set to signal an abnormal termination condition.  Right
now I am leaning toward the common-block approach.  Sorry David.

Thanks,

Craig

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Craig B. Markwardt, Ph.D.         EMAIL:    craigmnet@cow.physics.wisc.edu
Astrophysics, IDL, Finance, Derivatives | Remove "net" for better response
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