6 Implementation as an IDL/ADAS code

Codes that are available within the ADAS Project (Summers 1993, 1999) use IDL as the graphical user interface and FORTRAN for calculations. Each code uses a basic three window sequence composed of a file (or archive) selection window, a user data entry window and finally a graphical display and output routing window. Only the graphical display part, where the actual collision strength fitting takes place, is of interest to the non-ADAS user and this is available as a self-contained single IDL utility with simplified data inputs and outputs. The graphic display window is a variant of the ADAS Graph Editor developed by Brooks (1997) and has the appearance shown in Fig. 5. In the B-C plot mode, there are two sliders below the graph which control the B and C parameters. The spline is continually updated as the sliders are moved. The graph is editable, in that both the data values and the spline knot values can be modified. Operation is by a mouse click on the appropriate operation button and then dragging (or clicking on) a data point on the screen with the left mouse button. Clicking the right mouse button in the screen area terminates the operation. Multiple data points may be operated on before termination. Movement (Move Point) or deletion (Delete Pt.) of data points leads to recycling back to the graph editor before output. The B-C plot spline knot values can only be moved vertically (Move Knot) since the knot positions are fixed. New data points can be added between existing data points by single mouse click, when this is unambiguous (Add X-Pt.). A point can be added anywhere by two mouse clicks - the first identifies an existing point in the set of values which the new point is to follow (Add Pt.).

In interpolation mode, the sliders are not present, but the other operations are as above.