Good morning,
As an updated, I will note I was able to make the conversions. I did have a few issues. One is the use of heritage variable types. I do a lot of work with vectors. My approach was to create a User1 variable, and make this bold. The bold is a standard method to delineate vectors from scalars. I assume User1, User2 ... variable types are gone now in P8. This caused some collisions.
This is a big issue and hampers usability.
In my initial usage, I have maybe a few good things to say about Prime. Most are bad and repeats of the common themes in the forum. I seriously doubt if they will be fixed as I wonder if the current development path will allow that.
As for the good, it is nice to be able to put a READPRN in a solve block. Nice fix. Also, I liked the ability to build a function on the fly inside programming blocks. Nice fix. The programming if/elseif/else structure is a nice fix, Can't imagine why programming comments were never added. I used "strings like this" which works but must take memory and time to step over the evaluation. At least these were converted. the conversion did a nice job of flagging errors so I could trace through the sheet. This was well done.
Hmmm, what else? I guess that is it. I cannot think of any real improvements.
here is my critical review:
- Sheet navigation is a dog
- Find and replace is very jumpy. The inability to find subscripted variables is a fail.
- Areas are totally ruined. I cannot delete the area bars and am forced to remove the bars before conversion to avoid copy and paste outside the area. This is a big problem since I used areas for tidying up the work.
- Area text is too small to read.
- Plotting is just there and exists. This is pretty much unusable for report results. I only see it useful for assessing current solution.
- Plot numbers are too small to read. I cannot seem to find how to fix this.
- Animation feature is gone. This is a terrible loss. As an example, I have spooled deep Monte Carlo simulations using the FRAME keyword. Guess that's the end of that.
The plotting is one of the biggest issues my estimation. I had an idea. I have developed a plotting routine in Windows. It is pretty extensive. I was thinking about linking to a DLL version inside the MathCAD sheet. I can send data pointers or a text file name with data that could be written. I need to explore linking to user created DLLs. This would be a nice way to send plot data to an outside plotting tool. I don't have a lot of time now on this. Interested to hear some other feedback on this idea. As indicated, P8 plots are pretty much worthless and take enormous time to create and modify. If you think it worthy, I will start another thread and post the DLL for some testing.
Regards
