- Email: [email protected]
From Dr P. Nadkarni
TIPS -January 1983
10
age the use of the micro. A Computer Club in TIPS should help toward this end and facilitate the exchange of information and ideas. D. MACKAY
Department of Pharmacology, Worsley Medical and Dental Building, The Umversity, Leeds LS2 9JT, U.K.
From Dr C. H, W e i s c h e r My proposal for activities of the Computer Club in TIPS would be as follows. 1. Formation of an advertising office for programs, with the possiblity of supplying addresses of pharmacologists who want to exchange or develop programs in a team. 2. The software advertising office would need to separate the software according to microcomputer or language employed. 3. Annual competitions of software design could be organized. 4. The fields of software subjects of the publications should be balanced. 5. A 'brain-storming corner' could be started, dealing with ideas concerning subroutines, utilities and interface management. 6. Publication of contrary opinions on software problems of common interest could be instituted. 7. The Computer Club in TIPS should not be a theory oriented journal of professional statistics, it should be by pharmacologists, for pharmacologists. CARL HEINRICH WEISCHER
Fachtierarzt fur Pharmalcologie und Toxtcologte Schmidtbonnstrasse, 53 Bonn 1, F.R. G.
From Dr P. N a d k a r n i It's great to read that TIPS has set its sights on yet another first. I'll skip the preliminaries and get down to brass tacks right away. The immediate objective of the Club should be prevention of needless duplication of programming effort by the interchange of existing programs which have been tested, proved accurate and are being implemented at one or more centres. This requires the preparation of an inventory of all pharmacological applications for which
programs are being used. One plea, let's omit curve-fitting programs from the inventory since the ability to handle these is built in, even on ordinary programmable calculators such as the Casio FX-702P. The information collected would naturally be considerable and might require initial storage on computer media prior to organization. A summary, or the full details, could later be put into book form (in more than one volume if necessary) to serve as an invaluable reference work for all who need to know about the current state of the art. With information from other computing journals and publications being collected on a steady basis, TIPS could also act as an information bank in a constantly expanding field. As regards publishing programs, one problem is that apart from the most fledgling programs (which biomedical computing has long since passed), few programs can be printed in an understandable form in the space available for the average TIPS article. Prior to the program itself must come an explanation (in flow-chart form or otherwise) of the program algorithm. In the program itself, most of the space should be taken up, not by program statements, but by documentation, i.e. comments interspersed throughout the program explaining exactly what each part of the program is supposed to do. All shortforms and variables used in the program must also be defined. Documentation was almost totally missing from the program segments listed in Wagner's Fundamentals o f Clinical Pharmacokinetics (they went clean over my head the first time I looked at them). I mention this, not to belittle an excellent work, but merely to emphasize that communication with the reader should not cease the moment one switches from prose to programming language. The writing of inadequately documented programs is specifically proscribed in business organizations, and the same discipline needs enforcing in the biomedical world as well. Mathematically-oriented biomedical programs have been written in BASIC, FORTRAN, PASCAL or PL/1. Those oriented to data processing (e.g. drug interaction programs) have been written in PL/1 or COBOL. I seriously doubt if more than a handful of pharmacologists (as
opposed to biomedical computer professionals) are multilingual with respect to computer languages; those with desk-top computers are only likely to have learnt BASIC. I strongly recommend that the program text itself be omitted from TIPS articles, and a detailed flow-chart or topdown description be used instead. A computer professional can reconstruct a program given an adequate flow-chart and list of variables to be used. If he is actually interested in implementing the program, he will probably write to TIPS or the author for the original; more likely, he will use the flow-chart description to devise a program that meets the conditions of the environment he is working in. There is hardly a program that does not need modification when transplanted to a new environment. Modification can only be done satisfactorily when a flow-chart is available; the program statements are seldom helpful.
Long term objectives o f the TIPS Computer Club In the next few years, elementary programming ability will be considered essential to scientific literacy. All of us use the flow-chart (an offshoot of computing methodology) both to straighten out our ideas and to present them to others. Actual programming (one step further) has much to recommend itself as an intellectual discipline, to be taught to, and utilized by, biomedical scientists. Program design and biomedical research projects have much in common. The endobjectives are fast defined, the broad outline is planned followed by the finer details. The iterative approach is used throughout; a program/experiment may be redesigned, or even the original objective redefined depending on the initial results obtained. I feel that TIPS will have a role to play not merely in chronicling the developments of the pharmacology-computing field, but ultimately in moulding scientific opinion and ideas, as it has successfully done with pharmacological science itself. PRAKASH NADKARNI
Department of Pharmacology, G.S. Medical College, Bombay, India.
10
age the use of the micro. A Computer Club in TIPS should help toward this end and facilitate the exchange of information and ideas. D. MACKAY
Department of Pharmacology, Worsley Medical and Dental Building, The Umversity, Leeds LS2 9JT, U.K.
From Dr C. H, W e i s c h e r My proposal for activities of the Computer Club in TIPS would be as follows. 1. Formation of an advertising office for programs, with the possiblity of supplying addresses of pharmacologists who want to exchange or develop programs in a team. 2. The software advertising office would need to separate the software according to microcomputer or language employed. 3. Annual competitions of software design could be organized. 4. The fields of software subjects of the publications should be balanced. 5. A 'brain-storming corner' could be started, dealing with ideas concerning subroutines, utilities and interface management. 6. Publication of contrary opinions on software problems of common interest could be instituted. 7. The Computer Club in TIPS should not be a theory oriented journal of professional statistics, it should be by pharmacologists, for pharmacologists. CARL HEINRICH WEISCHER
Fachtierarzt fur Pharmalcologie und Toxtcologte Schmidtbonnstrasse, 53 Bonn 1, F.R. G.
From Dr P. N a d k a r n i It's great to read that TIPS has set its sights on yet another first. I'll skip the preliminaries and get down to brass tacks right away. The immediate objective of the Club should be prevention of needless duplication of programming effort by the interchange of existing programs which have been tested, proved accurate and are being implemented at one or more centres. This requires the preparation of an inventory of all pharmacological applications for which
programs are being used. One plea, let's omit curve-fitting programs from the inventory since the ability to handle these is built in, even on ordinary programmable calculators such as the Casio FX-702P. The information collected would naturally be considerable and might require initial storage on computer media prior to organization. A summary, or the full details, could later be put into book form (in more than one volume if necessary) to serve as an invaluable reference work for all who need to know about the current state of the art. With information from other computing journals and publications being collected on a steady basis, TIPS could also act as an information bank in a constantly expanding field. As regards publishing programs, one problem is that apart from the most fledgling programs (which biomedical computing has long since passed), few programs can be printed in an understandable form in the space available for the average TIPS article. Prior to the program itself must come an explanation (in flow-chart form or otherwise) of the program algorithm. In the program itself, most of the space should be taken up, not by program statements, but by documentation, i.e. comments interspersed throughout the program explaining exactly what each part of the program is supposed to do. All shortforms and variables used in the program must also be defined. Documentation was almost totally missing from the program segments listed in Wagner's Fundamentals o f Clinical Pharmacokinetics (they went clean over my head the first time I looked at them). I mention this, not to belittle an excellent work, but merely to emphasize that communication with the reader should not cease the moment one switches from prose to programming language. The writing of inadequately documented programs is specifically proscribed in business organizations, and the same discipline needs enforcing in the biomedical world as well. Mathematically-oriented biomedical programs have been written in BASIC, FORTRAN, PASCAL or PL/1. Those oriented to data processing (e.g. drug interaction programs) have been written in PL/1 or COBOL. I seriously doubt if more than a handful of pharmacologists (as
opposed to biomedical computer professionals) are multilingual with respect to computer languages; those with desk-top computers are only likely to have learnt BASIC. I strongly recommend that the program text itself be omitted from TIPS articles, and a detailed flow-chart or topdown description be used instead. A computer professional can reconstruct a program given an adequate flow-chart and list of variables to be used. If he is actually interested in implementing the program, he will probably write to TIPS or the author for the original; more likely, he will use the flow-chart description to devise a program that meets the conditions of the environment he is working in. There is hardly a program that does not need modification when transplanted to a new environment. Modification can only be done satisfactorily when a flow-chart is available; the program statements are seldom helpful.
Long term objectives o f the TIPS Computer Club In the next few years, elementary programming ability will be considered essential to scientific literacy. All of us use the flow-chart (an offshoot of computing methodology) both to straighten out our ideas and to present them to others. Actual programming (one step further) has much to recommend itself as an intellectual discipline, to be taught to, and utilized by, biomedical scientists. Program design and biomedical research projects have much in common. The endobjectives are fast defined, the broad outline is planned followed by the finer details. The iterative approach is used throughout; a program/experiment may be redesigned, or even the original objective redefined depending on the initial results obtained. I feel that TIPS will have a role to play not merely in chronicling the developments of the pharmacology-computing field, but ultimately in moulding scientific opinion and ideas, as it has successfully done with pharmacological science itself. PRAKASH NADKARNI
Department of Pharmacology, G.S. Medical College, Bombay, India.