1r2
and allowing powers of π as in 1p1).
NAP would never have happened if the author (Harvey Davies) had not worked with Rhys Francis and Ian Mathieson on development of the data-parallel modelling language DPML and learned from them things like yacc. This project met a premature death but we did learn a lot. It is hoped to implement unit calculus (automatic unit conversion and definition) in NAP as was done in DPML.
The other strong influence on NAP was netCDF. It is amazing that a portable array file format did not exist until Russ Rew and the late Glenn Davis developed netCDF in the early 1990s. This work was based on CDF, which was developed by Michael Gough and Lloyd Treinish. NAP is designed to read and write netCDF (and the similar HDF) files and stores data in memory in stuctures called NAOs, which have similar properties to netCDF variables.
Peter Turner (now with CSIRO Marine Research) made significant contributions to the NAP code. He wrote the C code for:
- browse_var.tcl
- caps_nap_menu.html
- colour.tcl
- hdf.tcl
- pal.tcl
- plot_nao.tcl
- proc_lib.tcl
Past and present members of The CAPS development group (Ian Grant, Edward King, Jenny Lovell, Paul Tildesley, Peter Turner and Chris Rathbone) have provided ideas, support and feedback over the years. Mark Collier and Janice Bathols were early users of NAP for processing results from atmospheric modelling. Their success and enthusiasm has has done a great deal to convert others to napism. Paul Durack produced the PDF version of the User's Guide.
Dr Takeshi Enomoto, Earth Simulator Center, maintains the nap Fink site, which provides distributions for the Mac OS X and Darwin platforms.