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Last checked or modified: Mar. 4, 1997

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PNG
Portable Network Graphics is a format for portable graphics, as you might surmise from the name. PNG unofficially stands for PNG's Not GIF, which originates from the decision of Unisys and CompuServe to require royalties from programs using the GIF format since Unisys has a patent on the LZW compression format used therein. The main advantages which PNG has over GIF are: alpha channels (variable transparency), gamma correction (cross-platform control of image brightness), and 2-D interlacing (a method of progressive display). It also compresses better in almost every case, with the difference generally ranging from 10% to 30%. Since PNG is intended to be single-image format only, it doesn't feature multiple-image support. PNG also has the advantage that it has one and only one official pronunciation, i.e. ``ping.'' Standard PNG features include: support for three main image types, i.e. truecolor, grayscale, and palette (with JPEG supporting the first two and GIF only the third); compression filters which are a way of transforming the image data (losslessly) so it will compress better; file integrity checks, e.g. an 8-byte magic signature at the beginning of every image, a 32-bit cyclic redundancy check, and an Adler-32 checksum applied to the complete stream of uncompressed data. The PNG standard has been implemented in libpng. Image viewers, editor and converters which can handle PNG include gd, gforge, Ghostview, GIMP, Gnuplot, ImageMagick, PIL, xli, xpaint, and xv. Web browsers which support the PNG format include Amaya, Arena, Chimera, Grail, Mosaic, Netscape, and XEmacs.

[http://www.wco.com/~png/]
[http://shire.ncsa.uiuc.edu/PNG/ ]

 
libpng
A companion library to the PNG specification written to reduce the amount of time and effort it takes to support said specification. Libpng is designed to handle multiple simultaneous sessions, to be easily modifiable, and to be portable to most machines. It uses zlib for the compression and decompression of PNG files. The source code for libpng, written in C, is available and should compile on most machines since that is a design goal. It is documented in an ASCII file included with the distribution. [http://www.wco.com/~png/pngcode.html]

PNG Magick
See under the Netscape entry since this is a Netscape plug-in.

 

PNM
See Pbmplus.

 

pod2ps
A program which takes one or multiple Perl POD files and produces a single PostScript file. It can be run on single or multiple files from the command line or using a script or command file. The output includes PDFMARK operators that can be used by the Adobe Acrobat Distiller program to produce a fully indexed PDF file. [http://www.oasis.leo.org/perl/scripts/textproc/pod2ps.dsc.html]

 

Point
A text editor specifically designed to use the mouse as much as possible in editing. Point provides convenient ways to keep a number of windows open on files and to copy text between and within files using the mouse. The features of Point include: an unlimited number of windows and files; easy moving and copying within and among windows; complete configurability including menus, key bindings, titles, etc.; extensive options for modifying the look and feel; the use of Tcl/Tk as a macro language and graphical toolkit; several searching options including for selection, last string searched for, a regular expression, the last regular expression, a string in a list of files, or a C tag; file browsers; circular mouse menus, i.e. gesture commands; and unlimited undo, redo, and again.

A source code distribution of Point is available. It is written in C with compilation and use also requiring Tcl 7.0 or greater or Tk 3.3 or greater. It is documented in a user's guide available in PostScript format as well as in a man page. A brief FAQ is also included.

[http://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/apps/editors/X/]

 

POLIS
A framework and package for the hardware-software co-design of embedded systems, especially those which are control-intensive, reactive, real-time systems. Examples of the types of systems for which POLIS is designed included microwave ovens, cameras, telephone switches, cellular phones, engine controllers, anti-lock brake controllers, robots, and plant monitors. The POLIS system is based around a single finite state machine-like (FSM) representation called a co-design finite state machine (CFSM). The CFSM transforms a set of inputs into a set of outputs with only a finite amount of internal state. It differs from FSMs in that the synchronous communication model of the FSM is replaced by a finite, non-zero, unbounded reaction time model in the CFSM. This model can be described as globally asynchronous and locally synchronous, with CSFM specifications a priori unbiased towards either a hardware or software implementation. The chief advantage of the abstract CFSM model is that is covers the behavior of all possible hardware-software implmentations at once.

In POLIS specifications are written in a high-level language such as Esterel that is directly translated into CFSMs. The formal specification and synthesis methodology uses many of the methods available for CSMs (e.g. VIS) which are applied via the inclusion of a translator from CFSMs to FSMs. The methodology also incorporates a set of abstraction and assumption rules specific to CFSMs and POLIS which makes is possible to verify designs larger than was previously possible. A co-simulation process is used which lets the designer test a wide range of choices for hardware/software partitioning and CPU and schedular selection, with the Ptolemy package currently used as a simulation engine. The portions of the CFSMs chosen for hardware implementation are optimized using logic synthesis techniques from the SIS package. The portions to be implemented in software are mapped onto a software structure which includes a procedure for each CFSM together with a simple real-time operating system. The reactive behavior of the CFSM portions is synthesized by first implementing and optimizing the desired behavior in a high-level, processor-independent form similar to a control/data flow graph, which is then translated into portable C code for further optimization on a given compiler. An application-specific OS consisting of a schedular and I/O drivers is generated for each partitioned design. The interfaces between the hardware and software domains are automatically synthesized within POLIS, and come in the form of cooperating circuits and software procedures embedded in the synthesized implementation.

A source code distribution of POLIS is available as are binaries for several platforms including Linux Intel. The source can be compiled on most UNIX flavors using the GCC compiler. The documentation includes a user's manual in PostScript format.

[http://www-cad.eecs.berkeley.edu/Respep/Research/hsc/abstract.html]

 

POLKA
A general purpose animation system particularly well-suited to building animations of programs, algorithsm, and computations (especially parallel computations). POLKA provides its own high-level abstractions to make the creation of animations easier and faster than with many other systems, with programmers not needing to be graphics experts to develop animations. It includes an interactive front-end called SAMBA which is an animation interpreter that reads ASCII commands or animation directives and performs them. A source code distribution of POLKA is available. It is written in C++ on top of UNIX and X11 and requires either the Motif or Xaw widget sets. It is documented in a technical report available in PostScript format.

[http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/softviz/algoanim/algoanim.html]

 

POLMAP
A Starlink Project package for the interactive data analysis of linear spectropolarimetric data. A linear polarization spectrum is a set of Stokes vectors which means that spectropolarimetric data is 4-D (and 6-D if the variance arrays of the Stokes parameters are included) and cannot be manipulated using standard spectral analysis packages. POLMAP is designed for the specific needs of these data sets. TRIPLOT is a command for the flexible display of polarization spectra. It displays triplots which consist of a top panel showing the position angle of the polarization in degrees, a middle section showing the percentage polarization, and a bottom section showing the intensity spectrum. A polarization spectrum may also be plotted in the QU plane using the QUPLOT command. Other commands include MERGE to merge two stack polarization spectra, ISFIT to fit a Serkowksi law to the data using a nonlinear least squares method (in order to subtract the interstellar polarization vector from the intrinisic polarization spectrum), and FITPA and PACALIB for PA calibration.

A binary distribution of POLMAP is available for DEC OSF/1, Linux Intel, and Sun Solaris platforms. It is documented in a user's manual available in PostScript format.

[http://star-www.rl.ac.uk/store/storeapps.html]

 

PolRadTran
A plane-parallel fully-polarized atmospheric radiative transfer model. This package contains separate versions, one for solar or thermal radiation in a medium of randomly oriented particles and one for thermal radiation in a medium of azimuthally symmetrically-oriented particles. The codes are written in Fortran and documented in ASCII README files. [http://nit.colorado.edu/~evans/polrad.html]

 

PolyglotMan
A filter for UNIX man pages. It takes as input man pages formatted for a variety of UNIX flavors (not [tn]roff source) and produces as output a variety of file formats, e.g. ASCII, TkMan, [tn]roff, Ensemble, SGML, HTML, LaTeX, RTF, etc. This is written in ANSI C and should compile on any UNIX box with a C compiler, including Linux. This used to be called RosettaMan. [http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~phelps/tcltk/index.html]

 

POM
The Princeton Ocean Model is a sigma-coordinate, free surface, primitive equation ocean circulation model which includes a turbulence sub-model. It is written in Fortran 77 and is documented in a large manual in PostScript format. [http://www.aos.princeton.edu/WWWPUBLIC/htdocs.pom]

 

PONGO
A Starlink Project application for interactively plotting data. It is written to behave similarly to MONGO but to use PGPLOT as the basic plotting package. PONGO features include:

A binary distribution of the PONGO package (along with binary distributions of the needed ancillary packages) is available for several platforms, including Linux. The documentation is contained within the distribution in LaTeX format.

[http://star-www.rl.ac.uk/store/storeapps.html]

 

POP
In systems using the Post Office Protocol mail is delivered to a shared server, with client programs periodically connecting to the server to download all pending mail. This is called a store-and-forward service that moves mail on demand from an intermediate server or drop point to single destination machines. The protocol is described in RFCs 1734, 1957, 2095, and 2195. Software capable of acting either as a POP mail server or client includes:

 

Popper
An implementation of the Post Office Protocol (POP) which runs on a variety of UNIX computers to manage electronic mail for Mac and MS-DOS computers. The features of Popper include: an idle timeout, a bulletin board, statistics gathering, an xlst (extended list) command, an uidl (unique identifier list) command, Kerberos, shadow passwords, rpop, an authorization file, logging of mail sent via POP to mail debug, MMDF handling (autodetection), APOP authentication, large site support, i.e. a server mode, a database for bulletin tracking, and Kerberos enabled no enabelable by a switch. A source code version of this is available with makefiles for many flavors of UNIX included. The package is documented in man pages. A shadow password version of this can be found in the Shadow Ina Box tool suite.

[http://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/system/admin/]

 

PORT (Bell)
The Portable, Outstanding, Reliable and Tested mathematical subroutine library is a large collection of mathematical subroutines written in Fortran. It covers most traditional areas of numerical mathematics except for statistics. In addition to the mathematical routines, there are several non-numeric routines that constitute what is called the Framework of the library. The Framework consists of error handling, memory stack allocation, and machine-constant specific routines that underly the mathematical routines and contain the platform specific features. The mathematical routines of PORT are divided into several categories including:

A source code distribution of the PORT library is available under a limited use non-commercial license. It is written in Fortran. Documentation is available in PostScript format.

[http://www.bell-labs.com/project/PORT/]

 

PORT (Netlib)
A library of Fortran routines for performing various optimization tasks. The full PORT3 library is a commercial product available from Lucent Technologies, although a subset of the routines is publicly available. An important part of the subset is a set of three subroutines which handle machine dependencies for integers, real numbers, and double precision numbers and which are called, respectively, i1mach, r1mach, and d1mach. The subset also includes aoxtrp, d0xtrp, dalloc, dxtrap, e9rint, enter, entsrc, eprint, erroff, i0tk00, i0tk01, i8save, i8tsel, ialloc, istkgt, istkin, istkmd, istkqu, istkrl, istkst, leave, movebc, movebd, movebi, movebl, movebr, movefc, movefd, movefi, movefl, movefr, mtstak, n5err, nerror, nirall, retsrc, s88fmt, setc, setd, seterr, seti, setl, setr, srecap, stinit, and xtrap. Also available in the public version of PORT are up-to-date versions of NL2SOL as well as extended variants, i.e. n2f, a version of NL2SNO; n2g, a version of NLSSOL; n2p, a variant of NLSOL that allows the residual vector and Jacobian matrix to be passed in piece rather than all at once; n2[fgp]b, versions of NL2SOL that handle simple bounds; ns[fg], versions for separable nonlinear least squares; ns[fg]b versions for separable nonlinear least squares with simple bounds; and dn[s2][fgp][b ], double precision versions of the above. There are also versions of the SMSNO, SUMSL, and HUMSL algorithms for general unconstrained minimization, e.g. mnf, which uses function values only; mng, which uses function and gradient values; mnh, which uses function, gradient, and Hessian values; mn[fgh]b, versions of the above which handle simple bounds; and dmn[fgh][b ], double precision versions of the above.

[http://www.netlib.org/port/]

 

PORTA
The POlyhedron Representation Transformation Algorithm package is a collection of optimization routines for analyzing polytopes and polyhedra given either as the convex hull of a set of points (plus the convex cone of a set of vectors) or as a system of linear equations and inequalities. PORTA guarantees correct numerical results since only integer operations are performed. If an arithmetic overflow occurs using integer arithmetic then the computations are restarted using double precision integer arithmetic. The programs in the package include:

A source code distribution of PORTA is available. It is written in C and is documented via man pages.

[http://www.zib.de/Optimization/Software/Porta/]

 

POSES++
A software tool for modeling and simulating arbitrary discrete and discontinuous systems. It can also handle suitably discretized continuous systems. POSES++ supports the analysis of existing or planned systems and optimizes them by creating various variants of the system and comparing their performance. It can also be used to generate complex control software by creating a model containing the optimal algorithms for controlling a system, and then creating a binary version of that model for the actual system being modeled. The modeling is based on high level Petri Net definitions. POSES++ can most obviously be applied to the field of logistics, i.e. the safeguarding of investment decisions, the shortening of development cycles, the optimization of such systems, etc. The POSES++ system consists of several components which each offer flexible and extensible interfaces to other POSES++ tools as well as to external software. The collection of tools comprises a multiserver-multiclient structure whose components communicate using TCP/IP via a command-line interface. The components include: External evaluation tools such as spreadsheets or math packages can also be used by POSES++ via an appropriate interface.

Binary distributions of POSES++ are available for DEC OSF/1, Sun SunOS, HP-UX, and Linux Intel platforms. A user's manual is available in either PostScript or HTML format.

[http://www.tu-chemnitz.de/ftp-home/pub/Local/simulation/poses++/www/product.htm]

 

POSIX
The Portable Operating System Interface is a set of operating system standards. It is an attempt by a consortium of vendors to create a single standard version of UNIX and is intended to define an operating system which behaves like UNIX whether or not it really is UNIX. The POSIX.1 standard defines the System Application Program Interface, i.e. the C procedure calls used in writing programs for UNIX. The POSIX.2 standard defines the Shell and Utilities and is heavily dependent on POSIX.1. The POSIX.2 standard is the one which will be used to implement user-level commands. The major aspects defined by the POSIX.2 standard are: the Execution Environment Utilities, e.g. cat, kill, etc.; the User Portability Utilities, e.g. more, vi, etc.; the Software Development Utilities; the C Development Utilities; the shell command language; language-independent interfaces for high-level programming languages; and definitions, general requirements, and the UNIX environment, i.e. locales, guidelines for utility command-line syntax, system-wide environment variables, and regular expressions.

The complete POSIX standards (as of 6/97) are (where a designation of the form POSIX.n is short for IEEE 1003.n):

Other POSIX standards which follow a slightly different numbering system are: Finished and published standards are marked with (+), extensions which have been included in the latest edition of the corresponding main standard are marked with (-), and all others are in the draft stage. Changes in POSIX standard status are announced in comp.std.unix, and the current status can be viewed at the first given URL. See Zlotnick (1991), Lewine (1991), and Gallmeister (1995).

[http://www.pasc.org/standing/sd11.html]
[http://www2.echo.lu/oii/en/api.html ]

 

Possum
A mathematical tool for the representation and manipulation of finite partially ordered sets (i.e. posets). Possum is designed especially for providing tools for domain theory and the construction of approximations to semantic domains, but can be useful to anyone with an interest in order theory. It can produce Hasse diagrams of the posets that it generates via interaction with the daVinci visualization system. The diagrams are displayed on the screen and can be interactively fine-tuned. They can also be exported as PostScript for printing. Interaction is either through the daVinic GUI or a command-line interpreter which uses the Objective Caml language. The latter allows complicated expressions involving posets to be input concisely. A source code distribution of Possum is available. Installation requires daVinci 2.0.3 or later and Objective Caml 1.05 or later. The use of the program is documented in several online HTML documents and the algorithms used in a technical report available in PostScript format.

[http://www.comlab.ox.ac.uk/oucl/groups/logfound/possum/index.html]

  

PostgreSQL
An enhancement of the POSTGRES database management system (DBMS), a next-generation DBMS research prototype. PostgreSQL retains the data model and data types of POSTGRES while replacing the PostQuel query language with an extended subset of SQL. Other enhancements include a program (psql) which supports GNU readline, a new front-end library (libpgtcl) which supports Tcl-base clients, a sample shell (pgtclsh) which provides new Tcl commands to interface Tcl programs with the PostgreSQL backend, a major overhaul of the large object interface, and more. The features of PostgreSQL that distinguish it from conventional data managers include: inheritance, i.e. a class can inherit from zero or more other classes and a query can reference either all instances of a class or all instances of a class plus all of its descendants; time travel, i.e. a feature that allows a user to run historical queries by specifying a time range; and non-atomic values, i.e. attributes can themselves contain sub-values that can be accessed from the query language, e.g. you can create attributes that are arrays of base types.

The source code for PostgreSQL, written in C, is available and can be compiled using gcc. It has been successfully tested on DEC Alpha, DEC Ultrix, Sun SunOS and Solaris, HP/9000, and Linux Intel platforms. An article about PostgreSQL can be found in the February 1998 issue of the Linux Journal.

[http://www.PostgreSQL.org/]

 

Postilion
A mail user agent based on TkRat with the addition of several features including robust support for IMAP in a shared folder environment. This uses IMAP mailboxes to support multiuser environments with system-wide configurations, mailboxes and address books, and shared folders. The source code distribution requires Tcl/Tk 8.0p2 as well as several common image libraries. [http://www.postilion.org/]

 

PostScript
A programming language optimized for printing graphics and text. It is a page description language wherein individual pages or images are described in a device independent manner within the source code. It is also a stack-based language, resembling an RPN calculator (e.g. the HP series). A good introduction to the language and its operators is A First Guide to PostScript which is available in both hypertext and PostScript formats. There is also a PostScript Tutorial and Reference in PostScript format. A couple of extremely useful resources are the PostScript FAQ and the PostScript Sources FAQ , the former containing answers to questions about the language and the latter links and pointers to PostScript related software. Useful PostScript-related software includes: The October 1997 issue of the Linux Journal contains an article about PostScript.

 

POV-Ray
The Persistence Of Vision Raytracer creates 3-D, photo-realistic images using a rendering technique called ray tracing. It reads in a text file containing information describing the objects and lighting in a scene and generates an image of that scene from the view point of a camera also described in the text file. It can also add greater realism to images via a process known as radiosity. It produces very high quality images with realistic reflections, shading, perspective and other effects. The file containing the scene image description cannot be created with the POV-Ray package. This must be done with a separate package called a modeler ] that allows you to visually arrange structures. The features of POV-Ray include an easy to use description language; a large library of example scene files; standard include files that pre-define many shapes, colors and textures; high quality output image files in 24-bit color; creation of landscapes using smoothed height fields; spotlights for sophisticated lighting; phong and specular highlighting for more realistic looking surfaces; many basic shape primitives; Constructive Solid Geometry for easily combining simple shapes into complex shapes; many built-in color patterns, surface bump patterns, and textures; combination of textures; and much more. A generic UNIX source code version is available as well as binary versions for Linux, DOS, Mac and Amiga platforms. The documentation is available in both HTML and PostScript formats. Also available are ancillary packages such as PVMPOV for distributing calculations across several platforms.

[http://www.povray.org/]

 
VisualPOV
A graphical interface for POV-Ray created using Tcl/Tk. The components include a toolbar for launching applications, a text editor specializing in the POV-Ray language, a tool for visualizing colors, and a window for changing rendering options. [http://perso.easynet.fr/~philhay/projet.us.html]

 

PPBB-Lib
The Portable Parallel Branch-and-Bound Library offers an easy way to parallelize sequential branch and bound algorithms for several architectures. No knowledge of hardware architecture or parallelization mechanisms is needed to use PPBB-Lib. Each parallel running process of the B&B application maintains the point of view of the sequential algorithm, with the library taking over the management of the subproblems creating during execution. Load balancers provided by the library ensure a balanced distribution of the subproblems. It is designed to run on an distributed memory multicomputer architecture using the given message passing functions and a C compiler. Binary versions of PPBB are available for both sequential and shared memory Linux Intel platforms as well as for several supercomputer platforms. It is documented in a user's manual available in PostScript format. It can be obtained by filling in an online request form.

[http://www.uni-paderborn.de/fachbereich/AG/monien/SOFTWARE/PPBB/]

 

PPCR
The POSIX Portable Common Runtime package provides integrated user-level support for pre-emptive lightweight threads, garbage collected storage, and dynamic program loading. PPCR can take advantage of kernel thread extensions in the underlying system and should run on any POSIX.1-conforming implementation which also supports BSD select() or System V poll(). It also uses memory protection features available in some systems to support incremental garbage collection. The source code is available and has been successfully built on Sun SunOS and Solaris, SGI IRIX, Linux Intel, and BSDI platforms. PPCR is documented in an ASCII file in the distribution.

[ftp://ftp.parc.xerox.com/pub/ppcr/]

 

pPCx
The parallel predictor-corrector package is a parallel version of the PCx package. The source code is written in C with MPI extensions and should be released soon (4/97). [http://www.cs.cornell.edu/Info/People/mwagner/pPCx/pPCx2.html

 

PPGPLOT
A Python module that provides an interface to the functionality of PPGPLOT. [http://ariadne.di.uoa.gr/ppgplot/]

 

PPI++
The Parallel Portability Interface in C++ is an object-oriented message-passing library. It is designed to serve as a stable interface between the client parallel code and the rapidly evolving distributed computing environments. By taking advantage of encapsulation, inheritance, and polymorphism supported by C++, PPI++ provides a clean and consistent programming interface which helps improve the clarity and expressiveness of client parallel codes and hides implementation details and complexity from the user to ease parallel programming tasks. To benefit fully from the functionalities, portability, and efficiency provided by MPI, the present implementation of PPI++ uses MPI functions to achieve interprocess communication and synchronization. However, the C++ user interface of PPI++ is designed to be very light weight and independent of MPI. The source code for PPI++, written in C++, is available. The package is documented in several technical reports available in PostScript format and also in Hsieh and Sotelino (1997).

[http://dalmatians.ecn.purdue.edu/~sesde/]

 

PPM
Abbreviation for the Portable PixelMap graphics format. This is used in the Pbmplus package.

 

ppmake
A parallel make utility which attempts to run as many parts of a large set of make jobs simultaneously on different computers connected by PVM as is possible. Ppmake requires on changes in makefiles, and can be used as easily as starting PVM on each participating computer and typing ppmake instead of make. The features include interrupt handling, setting timeouts, setting prefix commands, counting jobs, and calculation and display of the degree of parallelism. The ppmake software is available as source code. It's use requires GNU make as well as PVM. [http://www3.informatik.tu-muenchen.de/~zimmerms/ppmake/]

 

ppm2fli
A conversion program which converts PPM, PGM, and PBM pictures into FLI animations and vice-versa. This is supposed to be a replacement for fbm2fli. [http://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/apps/graphics/convert/]

 

PPP
The Point-to-Point Protocol is an Internet standard for the transmission of IP packets over serial lines. It is designed for simple links transporting packets between two peers with the links providing full-duplex simultaneous bi-directional operation. The three main components of PPP are: (1) a method for encapsulating multi-protocol diagrams; (2) a link control protocol (LCP) for establishing, configuring and testing the data-link connection; and (3) a family of network control protocols (NCP) for establishing and configuring different network layer protocols. [http://cs.uni-bonn.de/ppp/faq.html]

 

PPR
A UNIX print spooler designed for operating PostScript printers. PPR is a research project designed to explore the possibilities of the Adobe Document Structuring convention, PPD files, and automatic filtering with the goal of making printing easy for end users. The features of PPR include: operation of printers connected to parallel and serial ports, AppleTalk, LAN Manager X clients, LPD servers, and RAW TCP/IP adapters; capture of messages returned by the printer while a job is printing (if the printer interface supports it); sending notices to users when jobs are completed or when they fail; detection of printer faults and automatic attempts to clear them; interpretation of Document Structuring Convention (DSC) comments to support advanced features such as printer redirection, reverse order printing, collated copies, font downloading, font substitution, and forced duplex mode; passing print jobs through Ghostscript before sending them to print PostScript files on non-PostScript printers; automatic detection of non-PostScript output and passage through appropriate filters (e.g. Netpbm, TeX, and Groff); automatic detection and decompression of compressed files; printer queue advertising on AppleTalk networks; accepting jobs for AT&T's LAN Manager for UNIX; acceptance of jobs from other computers using the LPD protocol and from the Samba LAN manager; display of job percentage done in the queue listing; printing of banner pages; and much more.

The code is currently being developed on a Linux system and has also been tested on DEC OSF/1, SGI IRIX, *BSD, and Sun SunOS platforms. The documentation includes installation and user's manuals (available in PostScript and HTML format) and an extensive set of man pages.

[http://ppr-dist.trincoll.edu/printing/pprfaq.html]

 

PRCS
The Project Revision Control System is the front end to a set of tools that provide a way to deal with sets of files and directories as an entity to preserve coherent versions of entire sets. It presents the abstraction of named projects that have multiple versions, each consisting of a set of files arranged into a directory subtree. PRCS attempts to provide a much simpler model than similar packages like RCS or CVS. The operations allowed by the software include creating a copy of the directory tree for a project version, creating a new project version, searching for differences between project versions, inserting changes that occurred between two project versions (i.e. merging), printing out information about project versions, adding or subtracting the files contained in a new project version, moving files from one subdirectory (i.e. version) to another, etc. PRCS keeps track of all checked-in project versions in a repository and locks them in only while it is actually running.

The source code of PRCS is available as are binaries for FreeBSD, HPUX, IRIX, Linux ELF, Solaris, SunOS and ULTRIX platforms. The present (9/96) documentation is contained within a hypertext document at the site (in HTML format).

[http://www.XCF.Berkeley.EDU/~jmacd/prcs.html]

 

PRECCX
The PREttier Compiler Compiler eXtended is an infinite-lookahead parser generator for context dependent grammars which generates ANSI C code. Specification scripts are in very extended BNF with inherited and synthetic attributes allowed. Scripts can be compiled in separate modules and later linked together, and meta-production rules are allowed. The technology is essentially LL(oo) with optimizations, and a converter for yacc scripts is available. Lexical analyzers such a lex and flex are suitable pre-filters for PRECCX and are called in the same way that yacc calls them. A significant feature of PRECCX is the use of parameterized grammar definitions which allow context-dependent grammars. The higher order capability provided by parameterization and the modular arrangement of scripts make parser specifications much more maintainable. The infinite lookahead feature makes the semantics declarative, e.g. a non-terminal can be replaced by its definition without altering the semantics. A newer feature is that attributes can be synthesized on the fly and passed seamlessly into the parser, which extends the declarative programming paradigm from parameterized attribute grammar specifications to fully cover mixed and/or synthetic attributed grammars as well.

A distribution of PRECCX is available for Linux platforms. It is documented in a user's manual available in PostScript format.

[http://www.comlab.ox.ac.uk/archive/redo/precc.html]

 

premail
A program for the transparent encryption of email whose goal is to add privacy and authentication to existing email clients with a minimum of fiddling while preserving a rich set of functionality including MIME-based multimedia data types. The features of premail include: creation and management of newnym style nyms, some support for S/MIME using RIPEM as the cryptographic engine, integration with Netscape 3.0, support for all cypherpunk remailers, support for Mixmaster remailers, encrypted and signed email including both preparation and decoding, support for the PGP/MIME standard, support for MOSS through TIS/MOSS 7.1, automatic selection of remailer chains, clean handling of ``cc:'' field and other such interactions, and more. A source code distribution of premail is available. It is written in Perl and requires version 5 or greater. Documentation is available online.

[http://atropos.c2.net/~raph/premail.html]

 

PREP
A preprocessor for Fortran programs which is an alternative to RATFOR. The features include full macro facilities, a concise shorthand for array and vector statements, and support for all of the standard flow control constructs of Forth. The vector statement notation makes it possible to incorporate do loop unrolling automatically to any depth. The macro processor is a sort of pre-preprocessor for which the order of translation is file inclusion, macro processing, flow control extensions, and vector statements. A source code distribution of PREP is available. It is written in portable C and can be compiled and used on most generic UNIX platforms. Its use is documented in a user's guide in ASCII format.

[ftp://isgate.is/pub/unix/sec1/]

 

PreScript
A utility that converts PostScript to plain ASCII or HTML. It first converts a PostScript document to plain text and then inserts rudimentary HTML tags to partly automate the conversion of PostScript documents into HTML. PreScript also determines the line spacing of a document and uses that and indentations to determine paragraph boundaries, removes hyphenations where needed, and detects and translates most ligatures. It is written in PostScript and Python and requires Ghostscript 4.01 or later and Python 1.3 or later. [http://www.nzdl.org/technology/prescript.html]

 

PRFM
Piett's Remote File Manager is a tool for remotely updating Web sites using a Web browser. [http://www.piett.com/prfm/index.html]

 

PriMa
A printing filter that gives the user the ability to manipulate a document in various ways (e.g. change paper size, print only selected pages or ranges, print duplex, rearrange pages, etc.), to preview a document, and to send it to a file, a printer, mail, fax systems, or other programs. PriMa requires documents in PostScript format, but if they aren't it can use the MagicFilter package to convert a file to PostScript. PriMa is basically an interface built around the psutils package, and as such has all its capabilities. A source code distribution of PriMa is available. It can be compiled and used on many UNIX flavors including Linux. Compilation requires the XForms library at version 0.86 or newer. It is documented in a README file available in both ASCII and PostScript formats.

[http://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/system/printing/]

 

printing
A wide variety of software to enable the performance of various printing tasks is available for Linux platforms. Available packages include a2ps, GNU enscript, FLpr, LPRng, nenscript, PPR, PriMa, and rlpr.

 

Privtool
A PGP-aware replacement for the standard Sun mailtool program with a similar user interface and automagick support for PGP-signing and PGP-encryption. Privtool displays a list of messages along with flags indicating whether they are signed or encrypted and if they have had their signatures verified or have been decrypted. Double-clicking on a message will automatically decrypt and display it (and will also check the signature if necessary). When composing or replying to a message, the resulting message can be digitally signed and/or encrypted. It can also use the Mixmaster anonymous remailer to send the message through one or more remailers. The source code for Privtool is available at a European site which bypasses U.S. cryptography export regulations. It is known to work on Sun SunOS and Solaris, FreeBSD, and Linux Intel platforms. It is documented on the site as well as in documents in the distribution.

[http://www.unicorn.com/privtool/privtool.html]

 

PRL
The Programmer's Reusable Library is a family of compatible software libraries intended to promote software reuse. It consists of a layered set of seven libraries with a strong emphasis on computer graphics. These libraries provide a POSIX (POSIX) system interface, programming language primitive data types (PROGRLANG), graphical device drivers (DEVICE), low-level graphics (GRAPHICS), graphical function plotting (PLOT), graphical surface plotting (SURFACE), and graphical cartographic map plotting (MAP). The seven libraries provide a wide array of capabilities.

The PRL is available for several platforms and as of 12/15/95 was freely available in binary form for Linux platforms. A user's manual and reference guide in PostScript format are included in the distribution.

[http://isis.iah.com/oa/]
[http://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/devel/lang/fortran/ ]

 

PRM
The Prospero Resource Manager enables users to run sequential or parallel applications on a network of workstations. Sequential jobs are offloaded to lightly loaded processors while parallel jobs use some or all of the processor collection to achieve speedups in execution time. The parallel applications are based on the message passing model and are linked with a communication library which provides routines for sending and receiving tagged messages, broadcasting, and global synchronization. The interfaces available are the CM-5 CMMD library and a PVM interface, both of which allow the development of applications without having to modify any source code for use with PRM. The resource allocation functions of PRM are distributed across three entities: system managers which control access to a collection of processing resources and allocates them to jobs as requested by job managers; job managers which acquire processing nodes from system managers and initiate tasks on these nodes through node managers; and node managers which initiate and monitor tasks on the nodes on which they're running. The features of PRM include: utility programs to checking the status of running jobs, query the status of a system manager and the nodes it manages, and to gracefully shut down a PRM system; the use of an access control list (ACL) to determine whether the host requesting resources is authorized; library routines for standard I/O tasks and for task creation and resource management; the checkpoint and migration of tasks to other nodes when the current node makes itself unavailable; application debugging; and more.

A source code distribution of PRM is available. It is written in C and should compile and install on many generic UNIX platforms on which PVM is installed. The documentation includes a user's manual and several technical papers, all available in PostScript format.

[http://nii-server.isi.edu/gost-group/products/prm/]

 

PRMS
The Precipitation-Runoff Modeling System is a modularly-designed, deterministic, distributed-parameter modeling system developed to evaluate the impacts of various combinations of precipitation, climate, and land use on streamflow, sediment yields, and general basin hydrology. Basin response to normal and extreme rainfall and snowmelt can be simulated to evaluate changes in water-balance relationships, flow regimes, flood peaks and volumes, soil-water relationships, sediment yields, and ground-water recharge. Parameter optimization and sensitivity analysis capabilities are provided to fit selected model paramters and evaluate their individual and joint effects on model output. PRMS divides a watershed into subunits based on basin characteristics such as slope, aspect, elevation, vegetation type, soil type, land use, and precipitation distribution. Two levels of partitioning are available, with the first dividing the basin into homogeneous response units (HRU) based on basin characteristics. The sum of responses for all HRUs, weighted on a unit area basis, produces the daily system response and streamflow for a basin. The second partitioning level is used for storm hydrograph simulation. In this level the watershed in conceptualized as a series of interconnected flow planes and channel segments. Surface runoff is routed over the flow planes and into the channel segments, and channel flow is routed through the watershed channel system. An HRU can be either the equivalent of a flow plane or can be separated into a number of flow planes.

A source code distribution of PRMS for UNIX platforms is available. The primary documentation is contained within Leavesley et al. (1983). This is part of the USGS Water Resources Applications Software collection.

[http://water.usgs.gov/software/prms.html]
[http://www.geogr.uni-jena.de/software/prms.html ]

 

procmail
A powerful set of tools which enable the automatic processing of mail either as it is received or after it is already in a message folder. The package consists of three programs: procmail, formail, and lockfile. The features of the procmail program include:

The formail program features include

The lockfile program provides NFS-secure lockfiles to shell script programmers and gives normal users to ability to lock their system mailbox regardless of the permissions on the mail-spool directory.

The source code for the procmail package, written in C, is available on can be installed on most generic UNIX platforms (since the code is POSIX, ANSI C and K&R conforming). The documentation is contained within a veritable ocean of man pages.

[http://www.ii.com/internet/robots/procmail/]
[http://www.best.com/~ii/internet/robots/procmail/ ]

 

procmail-lib
A collection of procmail scripts for building an advanced mail handling system. The scripts include:

[http://reality.sgi.com/aks/mail/procmail-lib.html]

 

procps
This package consists of a library which parses the textual /proc filesystem and a suite of utilities which uses the library. The utilities are:

The procps utilities are available in source code as well as in executable form, with both included in the distribution. Each program is documented in a man page.

[http://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/system/status/ps/]

 

PROFIL/BIAS
The Programmer's Runtime Optimized Fast Interval Library is a C++ class library supporting the most commonly needed interval arithmetic and real operations. The supported data types are INT, REAL, INTERVAL, vectors and matrices of these types, and complex numbers. PROFIL is based in BIAS (Basic Interval Arithmetic Subroutines), a package which aims to do for interval arithmetic what BLAS has done for non-interval arithmetic, i.e. provide an interface for basic vector and matrix operations with specific and fast implementations for various architectures. The difference between the two is that all interval operations of PROFIL are independent of the internal representation and implementation of the interval types. The PROFIL/BIAS library includes various scalar interval, vector, integer vector, matrix, interval matrix, and integer matrix operations. It also contains a large selection of standard functions, e.g. trigonometric and log functions, absolute value, etc., as well as utility functions for finding matrix inverses, transposes, identities as well as some interval vector functions. There are also linear system solvers which compute the enclosures of solution sets. There is a procedure for using Fortran library functions with the library, and multiple precision arithmetic is also possible. An extension package called PROFEXT is available which contains miscellansous functions, test matrices, subroutines for local minimization, general linear singly linked lists, automatic differentiation subroutines, sample programs, and instructions on how to adapt the library to non-supported architectures.

Compilation of PROFIL/BIAS on UNIX systems requires the use of the dmake utility. The source code is configured to compile and installed on several platforms, including Linux Intel. An extensive user's and reference guide is available in Texinfo format.

[http://www.ti3.tu-harburg.de/indexEnglisch.html]

 

ProFit
A least squares fitting program that fits one protein structure to another, allowing as much flexibility as possible. [http://www.biochem.ucl.ac.uk/~martin/programs/index.html]

 

Progol
An inductive logic programming (ILP) system which combines inverse entailment with general-to-specific search through a refinement graph. Inverse entailment is used with mode declarations to derive the most-specific clause within the mode language which entails a given example. This clause is used to guide a refinement-graph search. The Progol search is efficient and has a provable guarantee of returning a solution having the maximum compression in the search-space. It does this by performing an admissible A*-like search guided by compression over clauses which subsume the most specific clause. It deals with noisy data by using the compression measure to trade-off the description of errors against the hypothesis description length, and allows arbitrary Prolog programs as background knowledge and arbitrarily define clauses as examples. Progol is available in a source code distribution. It is written in ANSI C and can be compiled and used on most UNIX platforms. It is documented in a user's manual available in PostScript format. See Muggleton (1995).

[http://www.comlab.ox.ac.uk/oucl/groups/machlearn/progol.html]

 

programming environments
To be completed.

 

programming language
A programming language is a program which usually translates source code written in a high level language (e.g. C, C++, Fortran) into assembly code for a specific computer architecture. Interesting Web sites include Programming Language Research site, the Virtual Library Computer Programming Languages site, the Language List , and the Catalog of Free Compilers and Interpreters . Useful books are Friedman et al. (1992), Gunter (1992), Mitchell (1996), and Wolfe (1996). Interesting review sites include:

Implementations of programming languages (interpreters, compilers, translators, preprocessors, or some combination thereof) include: ABC, AL, aplc, AppGEN, April, ASpecT, Basis, BCPL, Berkeley Logo, Beta-Prolog, Bigloo, BinProlog, Bongo, b2c, C, C++, Cambridge Modula-3, Cellang, CH, Cilk, cim, Clean, CLiCC, Clif, CLISP, CM, CML, CMUCL, Cool, COX, C*, CuPit, DrScheme, Dynace, Eiffel/S, Elk, ELROS, EML Kit, eon, ePerl, Esterel, e-TeX, EusLisp, Expect, F, f2c, f2cl, Flick, forth2c, FPKPascal, Gawk, gbeta, GCL, gema, Gentle, gforth, Glasgow Haskell Compiler, Glish, GLU, GNAT, GNUDL, Gödel, Golem, Gorby, gps, g77, Guavac, Guile, Harissa, hc, heitml, HMML, Hobbit, HPFFE, HTML, htp, Hugs, ICI, Icon, ILOG TALK, INTERCAL, Jacl, JACOB, Jade, JAS, JAVAR, JDK, JPP, j2c, JUMP, Kaffe, Kali Scheme, Kawa, LaTeX, lcc, Leda, Lout, Lua, Maisie, Marlais, Marx, MCPL, Mentat, Mercury, Merle, METAFONT, MetaPost, Mindy, MIT Scheme, ML Kit, MOCKA, Modula-2*, Modula-3, Moscow ML, mpC, MUMPS, MzScheme, Nascent, NESL, Oberon, Objective Caml, Obliq, Octave, OmSim, OPAL, Orca, OScheme, Ox, Oz, Parallaxis, Perl, PFE, Phantom, PHP/FI, Pict, Pizza, PM, Progol, Python, Q, R, Reactive-C, Regina, REXXimc, Risa, RLaB, RNPL, RScheme, Sather, SCC, Scheme 48, Scheme-to-C, SCM, sC++, Self, Shadows, Siod, Sisal, Slang, Slisp, Small Eiffel, Smalltalk/X, SML/NJ, SNOBOL4, SOAR, Squeak, SR, Stalin, STBasic, STk, SWI-Prolog, Tcl/Tk, Tela, TeX, ThisForth, Thomas, Toba, uC++, Uncommon Lisp, VIC, Wild Life, W-Prolog, Xi, XLisp-Stat, Yabasic, Yorick, and youtoo.

 

PROJ
A cartographic projection program designed as a standard UNIX filter utility to be employed with other programs in the generation of maps and charts as well as map digitizing applications. The PROJ package consists of three programs: proj/invproj, which performs forward and inverse transformation of cartographic data to or from cartesian data with a wide range of selectable projection functions; geod/invgeod, which performs geodesic (Great Circle) computations for determining latitude, longitude and back azimuth of a terminus point given an initial point latitude, longitude, azimuth and distance (direct) or the forward and back azimuths and the distance between the initial and terminus point latitudes and longitudes (inverse); and nad2nad, a North American Datum conversion filter to convert between the Datum of 1927 (NAD27) and that of 1983 (and which can also process State Plane Coordinate System (SPCS) and Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) grid data as well as geographic data for both input and output). The projections originally availabe were: cylindrical projections (e.g. Mercator, Transverse Mercator, Universal Transverse Mercator, Oblique Mercator, Central Cylindrical, Transverse Central Cylindrical, Miller, Lambert Cylindrical Equal Area, Gall (Stereographic), Transverse Cylindrical Equal Area, Equidistant Cylindrical, and Cassini); pseudocylindrical projections (e.g. Sinusoidal, Mollweide, Robinson, Eckert I through VI, Goode Homolosine, Hatano Asymmetrical Equal-Area, Loximuthal, McBryde-Thomas Flat-Polar Parabolic (or Quartic or Sinusoidal), Putnins P2, Quartic Authalic, Winkel I, Boggs Eumorphic, Collignon, Denoyer Semi-Elliptical, and Craster Parabolic); conic projections (e.g. Lambert Conformal Conic, Equidistant Conic, Perspective Conic, Albers Equal Area, Lambert Equal Area, Bipolar Oblique Conic Conformal, Polyconic (American), Rectangular Polyconic, and Bonne); azimuthal projections (e.g. Stereographic, Universal Polar Stereographic, Orthographic, Airy, Near-Sided Perspective, Lambert Azimuthal Equal Area, Azimuthal Equidistant, Hammer, Wagner VII, Aitoff, and Winkel Tripel); and miscellaneous projections (e.g. August Epicycloidal, Bacon Globular, Nicolosi Globular, Fournier Globular I, Apian Globular I, Eisenlohr, Ortelius Oval, Van der Grinten I through IV, and Lagrange).

More projections were added in a second release of the package, i.e. Two Point Equidistant (Doubly Equidistant), New Zealand Map Grid, LANDSAT, 50 United States Modified Stereographic, Alaska Modified Stereographic, Lee Oblated Stereographic, Miller Oblated Stereographic, Laborde, Mercator (Wright), Lambert Conformal Conic (Conical Orthomorphic), and Oblique Mercator (Rectified Skew Orthomorphic). A third release added yet more projections including: pseudocylindrical (e.g. Generalized Sinusoidal, Urmaev Flat-Polar Sinusoidal Series, Eckert V, Wager II through VI, Foucaut Sinusoidal, Hatano, Kavraisky VII, Putnins P3 through P6, Craster, MacBryde-Thomas Flat-Polar Parabolic (and Sine and Quartic), Sine-Tangent Series, Nell-Hammer, Robinson, Denoyer, Fahey, Ginsburg VIII, and the Urmaev V Series); and miscellaneous projections (e.g. Aitoff, Hammer-Aitoff, Eckert-Greifendorff, Larrivée, and Laskowski).

The package contains the source code, written in ANSI C for portability for all three programs. The documentation is contained within three technical reports available in PostScript format (which contain some very nice graphics for most of the projections). This package can be used as a standalone package as input for some other program or with the MAPGEN front-end package.

[ftp://kai.er.usgs.gov/pub/]

 

Prolog
Non-commercial Prolog systems include Beta-Prolog, BinProlog, PM, SWI-Prolog, WAMCC, W-Prolog, and XSB. PROLOG texts include Clocksin and Mellish (1984), Dodd (1990), Kim (1991), Konigsberger and deBruyn (1990), Pereira and Shieber (1987), and Shoham (1994).

 

Proteus
An exectutable, high-level, architecture-independent parallel programming notation in which sophisticated parallel algorithms free of complex low-level architecture-specific details can be developed and evaluated. This is a rapid prototyping system which permits the exploration of a large and complex space of alternatives. Proteus represents a refinement based development methodology where the refinement of a program consists of modifying it to reflect restrictions in the use of concurrency constructs, with the restriction expressing the adaptation of a high-level design to constructs efficiently supported on a specific architecture. Programs which are suitably refined in their use of the Proteus notation can be automatically translated to efficient parallel programs in low-level architecture-specific notations, and can then be run directly on the targeted architecture. The Proteus environment consists of several components. The program repository organizes different versions of Proteus programs and the low-level generated codes using either CVS or RCS. The program modification system creates new versions of programs via either manual editing to change the functionality or restriction of a program, or by the automatic generation of a low-level program from a restricted Proteus program. The program execution system consists of a Proteus interpreter including run-time monitoring and analysis functions as well as an interface to external modules in the form of existing applications or those generated by the translation of Proteus programs. The module interconnection facility (MIF) is a socket-based facility managed by the interpreter to permit Proteus programs to communicate with concurrently executing external applications. Proteus currently (5/97) only works with a CVL library implementation for MasPar computers, but an implementation which will run on top of PVM is being developed.

A sequential Proteus interpreter is currently available in source code format. It should compile and run on many UNIX platforms. The documentation includes a language manual available in PostScript format.

[http://www.cs.unc.edu/Research/proteus/]

 

ProTeX
A style-independent literate programming system built on top of LaTeX. ProTeX is extensible, language independent, and produces multiple output files. [http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/~gurari/systems.html]

 

protocols
Various computer and network protocols including:

 

pscover
A pair of Perl scripts for combining and extracting a PostScript cover page and an arbitrary PostScript document. These utilities use the Adobe Document Structuring Conventions to create a composite document understandable to printers and previewers. [http://www.cs.brown.edu/software/catalog.html]

 

PseudoPack
A Fortran software library for numerical differentiation by pseudospectral methods. The capabilities include differentiation of one or several vectors via a single subroutine call, differentiation on either the first or second index of a 2-D array, minimized roundoff error for the Chebyshev differentiation, and further reduction of roundoff error and matrix condition number by the use of a coordinate mapping. Algorithms provided include matrix-matrix multiply, even-odd decomposition and cosine transform-recursion. At presnet (7/96) only Chebyshev methods and first derivatives are supported although future versions will expand on both. (And, indeed, version 2 was released in 10/96 with even more capabilities). The available source code is written in Fortran 77 and uses the C preprocessor to compile the code into versions for Cray, IBM R6000, SGI, and generic platforms. The generic port requires BLAS and VFFTPACK, both avaiable from Netlib. A few Fortran 90 extension (long function and variable names and the enddo keyword) are used in the code and as such it might have to be tweaked a bit to work with g77. I haven't yet attempted to compile and use it on my Linux box.

[http://www.cfm.brown.edu/people/wsdon/home.html]

 

psmisc
A collection of /proc-based utilities including: fuser, which identifies processes using files; killall, which kills processes by name; pidof, which lists PIDs of processes specified by name; and pstree, which shows the currently running processes as a tree. A source code distribution of these utilities is available. [ftp://lrcftp.epfl.ch/pub/linux/local/psmisc/]

 

P-SPARSLIB
A set of tools for solving large sparse linear systems on distributed memory computers. Solutions are obtained by first partitioning a linear system, then splitting it according to the partitioning, constructing a distributed data structure, and finally invoking a preconditioned Krylov solver for its solution. It consists of four major parts: accelerators, preprocessing tools, preconditioning routines, and message-passing tools. The accelerators and preconditioners are the functional layer, with the former based on Krylov subspace methods and the latter needed because the former tends to work poorly without preconditioning. The functional modules are designed to be as independent as possible from data structures and the specifics of the message passing libraries used. The non-functional module contains the message passing layer of the library, which provides an interface between the communication functions used in the library and those in standard communication libraries as well as native libraries of some parallel computers. The routines are designed to exploit redundancy of communications and asynchronous message passing capabilities to reduce latency and allow an overlap between computations and communications. This layer may be phased out in future releases if one of the standard message passing libraries improves sufficiently to supply the desired performance characteristics on the appropriate architectures.

Source code distributions of P-SPARSLIB are available. Versions are available for CM5-CMMD, CRAY-T3D, MPI and PVM platforms. A technical report/user's guide is available in PostScript format.

[http://www.cs.umn.edu/Research/arpa/p_sparslib/psp-abs.html]

 

PSPLOT
A library of Fortran-callable subroutines for generating two-dimensional technical drawings or graphics in PostScript format. It supports black and white and color graphics, and contains 75 subroutines for performing all the basic operations that are needed for creating technical graphs. PSPLOT is written in Fortran 77, supports the standard 35 PostScript fonts, and is platform independent. [http://www.nova.edu/ocean/psplot.html]

 

PStill
A PostScript to PDF converter. It is a level 1 clone interpreter so Level 2 jobs won't run on it (although quite a bit of Level 2 is emulated). It conforms mostly to the PDF 1.1 specification. A binary distribution is freely available for Linux platforms. [http://www.noir.net/frank/pstill.html]

 

pstoedit
A program which converts PostScript and PDF files to other vector graphic formats so they can be edited graphically. Pstoedit consists of a PostScript frontend which needs to call an interpreter like Ghostscript and the individual backends which are plugged into a framework. The framework can be used independently from the frontend and provides a uniform interface to all of the different backends. The formats supported by the backends are: debug, XFig, CGM, PDF, Gnuplot, DXF, LWO, Framemaker MIF, RIB, RPL, JAVA, PS, MET, WMF, Tgif, Idraw, and dump. The pstoedit package is written in C++. It can be compiled using g++. It is documented in a man page as well as in a user's guide in HTML format.

[ftp://ftp.digex.net/pub/X/contrib/applications/pstoedit/]

 

pstoepsi
A set of scripts for converting arbitrary PostScript to Encapsulated PostScript with an optional preview image. These can generate EPS, EPSI and EPSF formats. The use of pstoepsi requires both the Pbmplus tools and the Ghostscript converter. [ftp://ftp.cs.purdue.edu/pub/dgc/]

 

pstotext
A program that works with Ghostscript (version 3.33 or later) to extract plain text from PostScript and PDF files (although the latter requires Ghostscript 3.51 or later). This is written in C and should compile on almost any UNIX platform with a C compiler. The documentation is contained within a man page. [http://www.research.digital.com/SRC/virtualpaper/pstotext.html]

 

PSTricks
A collection of PostScript-based TeX macros that allow the inclusion of color, graphics, rotation, trees and overlays in TeX documents. [http://www.princeton.edu/~tvz/tex.html]
[http://www.tug.org/applications/PSTricks/ ]

 

PSTSWM
The Parallel Spectral Transform Shallow Water Model is a message passing benchmark code and parallel algorithm testbed which solves the nonlinear shallow water equations (SWE) on a rotating sphere using the spectral transform method. PSTSWM was developed to evaluate parallel algorithms for the spectral transform method as it is used in global atmospheric circulation models. Multiple parallel algorithms are embedded in the code and can be selected at run-time as can the problem size, number of processors, and data decomposition. Six different problem test cases are supported, each with associated reference solutions and solution and error analysis options. The PSTSWM source code is available. It is written in Fortran 77 with VMS extensions and a small number of C preprocessor directives. Message passing can be implemented with the MPI, PICL, or PVM libraries with the choice being made at compile time. The package is documented in a user's guide and some technical reports, all available in PostScript format.

[http://www.epm.ornl.gov/chammp/pstswm/]

 

psutils
A set of utilities to process PostScript source code. The utilities include:

These programs are all written in C and can be compiled and installed on generic UNIX platforms. The programs are documented in individual man pages.

[ftp://ftp.dcs.ed.ac.uk/pub/ajcd/]
[http://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/apps/wp/ ]

 

pt
The Pluto Tools perform various operations on text files specified on the command line or standard input. These operations include: converting any character to upper or lower case; converting first letters of any word, period, or paragraph to upper case, switching upper case to lower case and vice versa, converting to UNIX, DOS, or MAC text file formats, removing enters that are not at the end of a paragraph, converting tabs to spaces and vice versa, indentation, simple encryption, stripping binary parts of files, stripping 8th bits, and deleting spaces and tabs at the end of each line. [http://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/utils/text/]

 

PTC
Prometheus TrueColor is a portable true color graphics system suitable for use in the creation of games, demos, emulators and other real time graphics software. It is especially useful as the framework for a 2- or 3-D rendering engine. PTC is a set of C++ classes that abstracts the platform-specific details of mode setting, surface handling, pixel format conversion and display updates. It allows you to write graphics code once and recompile without changing anything on all supported platforms. A feature not found in most other libraries is virtual display modes, which enable the programmer to work internally in 8-bit indexed color, RGB565 hilcolor or ARGB8888 true color independently of the display pixel format. A source code distribution of PTC is available. It is currently (6/98) supported on DOS, Win32 and Linux under a wide range of C++ compilers, and support for X11, BeOS and Amiga is under development. Various documentation is available online.

[http://www.gaffer.org/ptc/]

 

ptcl
A package that implements PGPLOT functions as Tcl/Tk commands. This allows users to create plots from the command line or from scripts and, with the addition of various Tcl extensions, to also create simple graphical user interfaces that allow direct interaction with plots. It has been ported to HP-UX Linux, and SunOS platforms with ports to other platforms on which PGPLOT and Tcl are already installed not a horribly difficult task. [ftp://ftp.fornax.usno.navy.mil/dist/ptcl/ptcl.html]

  

pthreads
Pthreads is the POSIX 1003.1c threads standard put out by the IEEE standards committee. It is also the name of a software package obtainable at the given URL. See Nichols et al. (1996). [http://www.mit.edu:8001/people/proven/pthreads.html]

 

p2c
A Pascal to C translator. [ftp://cs.caltech.edu/pub/]
[http://www.synaptics.com/people/daveg/ ]

 

Ptolemy
A software system upon which to build prototyping environments. Examples thus far of such environments include dataflow-oriented graphical programming for signal processing, discrete-event modeling of communication networks, and synthesis environments for embedded software. If you think about it, just about any sort of numerical or digital signal processing package is possible to implement with this system. After all, linear algebra and matrix operations are pretty much universal. The source code is available as well as binaries, including (I think) a Linux binary. Fair warning: This, like Khoros, is a *huge* package with a lot of documentation. [http://ptolemy.eecs.berkeley.edu/]

 

PTool
A database tool providing persistence for data which supports the creation, storage, access and querying of complex objects. It is designed for high performance access to data and to scale as both the amount of data and the complexity of queries increase. PTool doesn't have the overhead of a general purpose object oriented database and thus is particulary well-suited for applications requiring high performance access to historical data. It is designed to query data distributed in a hierarchical storage system and is thus also well suited for data mining applications. It is also designed to query data in a multi-computer environment which makes it well suited for applications requiring numerically intensive queries. The PTool design optimizes for high-performance access to historical data, provides a standard interface to IEEE compliant hierarchical storage systems, provides support for distributed data queries using message passing for loosely and tightly coupled clusters of workstations, supports uniform addressing of large amounts of data using 64 bit pointers, can be integrated in a modular fashion to existing scientific computing environments, and includes class libraries for scientific computing. The current (3/97) release is broadly ODMG compliant and the next major release is planned to be CORBA compliant.

The PTool distribution contains the source code including a variety of container classes, a series of pedagogical examples, tools for working with tabular data, and other tools including a basic tool for visualizing series data. The source code is set up to be compiled on Sun or IBM workstations, but I got it to compile with fairly minor modifications, i.e. removing the Sun and IBM specific include files from various programs.

[http://www_lac.eecs.uic.edu/]

 

PTUI
The Python/Tkinter User Interface is a Python code development user interface consisting of an editor and an interpreter which can be embedded in larger applications or used by itself. It is an attempt to create an environment in which you can run code from within the Tk mainloop like in the wish interpreter, and uses a small framework of classes that can be embedded into a larger application to facilitate rapid development and testing. The features of PTUI include: undo; a modularization feature to communicate between buffers; automatic indentation; syntax highlighting; an argument to execute an initialization script to change height, colors, fonts, etc.; searchable online help; an arbitrary object browser; multiple buffers with individual namespaces; usability as a frame which can be embedded in another application; find/goto; comment/uncomment regions; built in output and error windows; and more.

A source code version of PTUI is available. Installation requires Python 1.4 or higher, Tkinter (part of the Python distribution), and Tcl/Tk (versions 7.4/4.0 through 7.6/4.2).

[http://starship.skyport.net/crew/zack/ptui/]

 

ptx
A GNU version of a traditional permuted index generator. It can handle multiple input files simultaneously, produce TeX compatible output, and produce KWIC (KeyWords In Context) indexes. [http://www.gnu.ai.mit.edu/order/ftp.html]

 

PUZZLE
A package for reconstructing phylogenetic trees from molecular sequence data by maximum likelihood which implements a fast tree search algorithm (i.e. quartet puzzling) that allows for the analysis of large data sets and automatically assigns estimations of support to each internal branch. It incorporates rate heterogeneity (invariable sites plus Gamma distributed rates) in all available substitution models (e.g. TN, HKY, and F84 for nucleotides; Dayhoff, JTT and mtREV24 for amino acids). PUZZLE computes pairwise maximum likelihood distances as well as branch lengths for user specified trees. It offers a novel method, i.e. likelihood mapping, to investigate the support of internal branches without computing and overall tree. Other features include:

PUZZLE is written in C and can be compiled and used on UNIX, VMS, Mac and MS-DOS platforms. It is documented in a user's manual available in both HTML and PostScript format.

[http://www.zi.biologie.uni-muenchen.de/~strimmer/puzzle.html]

 

PVaniM
A enhancement of PVM that produces animations of the execution of PVM applications. This is actually a couple of separate subsystems, one of which provides fine-grained, post-mortem visualizations of PVM applications, and the other which provides on-line, low-overhead, minimal perturbation visualizations. Both are built on top of the POLKA visualization package and can be used on packages with both POLKA and PVM installed. [http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/softviz/parviz/parviz.html]

 

PVM
The Parallel Virtual Machine) software is a package that enables a collection of heterogeneous computers to be used as a coherent and flexible concurrent computational resource. PVM is an integrated set of software tools and libraries which emulates a general-purpose, flexible, heterogeneous concurrent computing framework on interconnect computers of varied architecture. The system consists of two parts: a daemon called pvmd which resides on all computers comprising the virtual machine, and a library of PMV interface routines containing a functionally complete repertoire of primitives needed for cooperation between the tasks of an application. PVM currently (5/97) supports C, C++ and Fortran language interfaces. The C and C++ language bindings are implemented as functions while the Fortran bindings are implemented as subroutines The principles upon which PVM is based include: a user-configured host pool containing a list of computers upon which computational tasks can be performed which can be added to and deleted from before or during operation; translucent access to hardware where application programs may view the hardware environment either as an attributeless collection of virtual processing elements or can exploit the capabilities of specific machines in the host pool by positioning specific tasks on the most appropriate machines; process-based computation in which the basic unit of parallelism is a task, i.e. an independent sequential thread of control which alternates between communication and computation; an explicit message-passing model in which collections of computational tasks perform the workload for an application using data-, functional-, or hybrid-decomposition and cooperate by explicitly sending and receving messages to one another; heterogeneity support in terms of machines, networks, and applications; and multiprocessor support wherein PVM uses the native message-passing facilities on multiprocessors to take advantage of the underlying hardware. The January 1998 issue of the Linux Journal contains an article on using PVM with Linux.

Ancillary programs or languages which require the use of PVM include: Adsmith, A++/P++, BLACS, CL-PVM, CODE, Condor, Converse, COSMICS, C*, Dome, DPTMA, DSU, Emu/fdtd, fsolver, GALOPPS, GLU, HPF, JavaPVM, LPARX, Maisie, mEDA-2, NAMD, Pade, Parallax, Para++, PCCM, Perl-PVM, PFSLib, PIM, PIOUS, POV-Ray, ppmake, P-SPARSLIB, PSTSWM, PVaniM, ScaLAPACK, Sciddle, Surface Evolver, Tkpvm, TRAPPER, VIC, VPE, and Xi.

PVM supports a wide variety of platforms (including those running Linux) that may be interconnected by a variety of networks. Extensive documentation is available, including a PostScript file of a recently published book about PVM. See Geist et al. (1994).

[http://www.epm.ornl.gov/pvm/pvm_home.html]

 
TPVM
Threads-oriented PVM is an experimental subsystem for PVM which supports the use of light-weight processes or threads as the basic unit of scheduling and parallelism. TPVM is designed for ease of portability with the changes required for a different platform, OS, or threads implementation isolated in a single module. The thread model overcomes several of the disadvantages of a process-oriented model, principal among which are task initiation and scheduling costs, overlapping computation and communication on a single processor, smaller granularity, exploiting small-scale SMMPs, and supporting event- or data-driven active message based computation. [http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~ajf2j/tpvm.html]

 

PVRG-JPEG
A fairly complete JPEG baseline package targeted toward simulation and research (where a baseline system is defined as the minimal system needed to claim JPEG compatibility). The system includes a flexible encoder which can generate compressed files through different valid strategies which can also decode all possible JPEG baseline compressed files. The source code for PVRG-JPEG, written in C, is available and can be compiled on most generic UNIX systems with a C compiler. The package is documented in a 55 page PostScript technical manual and user's guide.

[ftp://havefun.stanford.edu/pub/jpeg/]

 

PVS
A verification system, i.e. a specification language integrated with support tools and a theorem prover. It is intended to capture the state-of-the-art in mechanized formal methods and to be sufficiently rugged to be used for significant applications. The PVS system consists of a specification language, a number of predefined theories, a theorem prover, various utilities, documentation, and several examples from a variety of application areas. PVS has thus far been chiefly applied to algorithms and architectures for fault-tolerant flight control systems and to problems in hardware and real-time system design. The PVS language is based on classical, typed higher-order logic with base types including uninterpreted types that may be introduced by the user as well as built-in types such as booleans, integers, reals, and the ordinals. Type constructors include functions, sets, tuples, records, enumerations, and recursively-defined abstract data types such as lists and binary trees. The theorem prover provides a collection of powerful primitive inference procedures which are applied interactively under user guidance wihtin a sequent calculus framework. The inferences include propositional and quantifier rules, induction, rewriting, and decision procedures for linear arithmetic, with the implementations thereof optimized for large proofs. PVS uses Emacs to provide an integrated interface for the language and prover. Extensive help, status reporting, and browsing tools are available as well as the capability of typesetting specifications in LaTeX. Proof trees and theory hierarchies can be displayed graphically using Tcl/Tk.

PVS is implemented in Common Lisp and runs on most workstations with a Common Lisp compiler with an integrated CLOS. It is supported on Sun SunOS and Solaris, IBM AIX, and Linux Intel running Redhat 4.0 or greater. A plethora of manuals are available for PVS, all in PostScript format. These include an overview, a quick reference, a language manual, a system manual, a prover manual, a tutorial, and more. The package are freely available via the Web but a license agreement must also be signed to use it.

[http://www.csl.sri.com/pvs.html]

 

pWEB
A parallel Web server harness which provides a request-forwarding context-switching infrastructure for building HTTP services over a cluster of workstations. Popular servers like Apache, NCSA, Spinner, Plexus, etc. can be hooked up onto the harness for parallel processing HTTP requests. This provides the most benefit on workstation clusters with fast interconnects like ATM or on distributed memory parallel computers, although it can be used over ethernet connections. Advantages which can be derived from pWEB include load balancing (i.e. CPU intensive CGI requests can be distributed across workstation nodes) and distributed file I/O (i.e. file access congestion can be decreased by directing file requests to a specific node's local disk). The pWEB package includes the source code which is written in C. The Makefile includes parameters to compile on UNICOS, SGI IRIX, IBM AIX, Sun Solaris and SunOS, DEC OSF/1, and Linux systems. The documentation is included in the package and is also available online.

[http://phobos.nsrc.nus.sg/STAFF/edward/pweb.html]

 

PXI
A program developed to allow for the convenient visualization of n-dimensional economectric data which is useful for displaying all types of data. PXI offers publication quality output, a convenient graphical user interface (GUI), and powerful data manipulation features. The features of PXI include:

PXI is a shareware package with binaries available for MS Windows, Sun SunOS and Solaris, HP-UX, IBM RS/6000, and, upon request, Linux platforms.

[http://www.cco.caltech.edu/~egrayver/pxi.html]

 

PyNG
The Python Network Grapher is a tool designed to give visible insight into network usage. It summarizes network traffic flow through a GUI and plots a usage graph for the current day as well as overviews for the week, month, and year. [http://www.cb.hva.nl:81/PyNG/]

 

PyOpenGL
A Python interface to the OpenGL widget set. [http://www.python.de/]

 

PyrTools
A collection of Matlab tools for multi-scale image processing. The PyrTools set includes programs for: recursive multi-scale image decompositions including Laplacian pyramids, QMFs, wavelets, and steerable pyramids to operator on 1-D or 2-D signals of arbitrary dimension; fast 2-D convolution routines with subsampling and boundary handling; fast point operations, histograms, and histogram matching; fast synthetic image generation; and display routines for images and pyramids. [ftp://ftp.cis.upenn.edu/pub/eero/]

 

Python
An interpreted, interactive, object-oriented programming/scripting language. It has modules, classes, exceptions, high level dynamic data types, and dynamic typing along with interfaces to many system calls, libraries and various windowing systems (e.g. X11, Motif, Tcl/TK, Mac, MFC, STDWIN). New modules are easily written in C or C++, and it is usable as an extension language for applications that need a programmable interface. The source code is available and easily installable on UNIX platforms, and binaries are available for many platforms including Linux. A nicely done Python Tutorial can be found at UnixWorld Online . The Jan. 1996 issue of the Linux Journal has an introduction to Python by Jeff Bauer. A project to develop a matrix language called Numerical Python is well under way as of 7/96. See Lutz (1996) and Watters et al. (1996). Related packages which are written in, extend or use Python in some way include: Apache, Bobo, BSCW, Chautauqua, FastCGI, Fnorb, Gadfly, Grail, GraphApp, Guile, HTMLgen, ILU, JPython, Mailman, Medusa, MMTK, mSQL, NSAPY, NumPy, Paos, PIL, Pipermail, Pmw, PTUI, PyNG, PyOpenGL, PythonNetCDF, PyXForms, Rivet, SAML, SNMPY, SWIG, SYLU, Wafe, Wily, WPY, wxPython, X-extension, and zlib.

[http://www.python.org/]
[http://starship.skyport.net/ ]

 
PIL
The Python Imaging Library adds an image object to the Python interpreter. This allows loading image objects from a variety of file formats as well as applying a large set of image operations to them. The operations which can be performed using the PIL objects include: color manipulations including bilevel, greyscale, palette, true color (RGB), true color with transparency, and color separation (CMYK); copying, cutting, and pasting; transparency; channel and point operations; color transforms including matrix operations; and image enhancement including convolution filters. File formats which can be opened, loaded, and saved are: BMP, EPS (with Ghostscript), GIF, IM, JPEG, MSP, PNG, PPM, TIFF and XMB. Read only formats are CUR, DCX, FLI, FLC, GBR, GD, ICO, IMT, PhotoCD, PCX, PSD, TGA, SGI, SUN, and WMF, and save only formats are PDF and EPS (without GhostScript). PIL can be installed on most platforms which support Python. Full functionality requires the aforementioned Ghostscript as well as the IJG JPEG library and the ZLIB library. The package is documented in a 40 page manual in PostScript format.

[http://www.python.org/sigs/image-sig/Imaging.html]

 

PyXForms
A package that basically binds together the Python interpreted language and the XForms GUI builder. This faciliates the quick and easy construction of GUIs on many UNIX/X Window platforms. It is object oriented, extensible, and allows the non-graphic portions of the program to be written in Python, C or C++. [http://ultra7.unl.edu.ar/pyxforms]

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next up previous contents
Next: Qa-Qm Up: Linux Software Encyclopedia Previous: Pa-Pm
Steven K. Baum
7/16/1998