5.6.7 - Quick Check Quadratic Formula
Annice
WARNING: This documentation is not maintained anymore. Some part might be obsolete or wrong, some part might be missing but still some valuable information can be found there. Instead please refer to the ROOT Reference Guide and the ROOT Manual. If you think some information should be imported in the ROOT Reference Guide or in the ROOT Manual, please post your request to the ROOT Forum or via a Github Issue.
Masaharu Goto wrote the C++ interpreter CINT that was an essential part of ROOT before ROOT 6. Despite being 8 time zones ahead of us, we have the feeling he has been sitting in the room next door since 1995.
Andrei and Mihaela Gheata (Alice collaboration) are co-authors of the ROOT geometry classes and Virtual Monte-Carlo. They have been working with the ROOT team since 2000.
Ilka Antcheva has been working on the Graphical User Interface classes. She is also responsible for this latest edition of the Users Guide with a better style, improved index and several new chapters (since 2002).
ROOT was developed in the context of the NA49 experiment at CERN. NA49 has generated an impressive amount of data, around 10 Terabytes per run. This rate provided the ideal environment to develop and test the next generation data analysis.
When it comes to storing and mining large amount of data, physics plows the way with its Terabytes, but other fields and industry follow close behind as they acquiring more and more data over time. They are ready to use the true and tested technologies physics has invented. In this way, other fields and industries have found ROOT useful and they have started to use it also.
In the bazaar view, software is released early and frequently to expose it to thousands of eager co-developers to pound on, report bugs, and contribute possible fixes. More users find more bugs, because they stress the program in different ways. By now, after ten years, the age of ROOT is quite mature. Most likely, you will find the features you are looking for, and if you have found a hole, you are encouraged to participate in the dialog and post your suggestion or even implementation on the ROOT forum.
If you have a question, it is likely that it has been asked, answered, and stored in the ROOT Forum. Please use the search engine to see if your question has already been answered before posting a topic in the Forum.
To show the ROOT command line, we show the ROOT prompt without numbers. In the interactive system, the ROOT prompt has a line number (root[12]); for the sake of simplicity, the line numbers are left off.
ROOT is an object-oriented framework aimed at solving the data analysis challenges of high-energy physics. There are two key words in this definition, object oriented and framework. First, we explain what we mean by a framework and then why it is an object-oriented framework.
Programming inside a framework is a little like living in a city. Plumbing, electricity, telephone, and transportation are services provided by the city. In your house, you have interfaces to the services such as light switches, electrical outlets, and telephones. The details, for example, the routing algorithm of the phone switching system, are transparent to you as the user. You do not care; you are only interested in using the phone to communicate with your collaborators to solve your domain specific problems.
Programming outside of a framework may be compared to living in the country. In order to have transportation and water, you will have to build a road and dig a well. To have services like telephone and electricity you will need to route the wires to your home. In addition, you cannot build some things yourself. For example, you cannot build a commercial airport on your patch of land. From a global perspective, it would make no sense for everyone to build their own airport. You see you will be very busy building the infrastructure (or framework) before you can use the phone to communicate with your collaborators and have a drink of water at the same time. In software engineering, it is much the same way. In a framework, the basic utilities and services, such as I/O and graphics, are provided. In addition, ROOT being a HEP analysis framework, it provides a large selection of HEP specific utilities such as histograms and fitting. The drawback of a framework is that you are constrained to it, as you are constraint to use the routing algorithm provided by your telephone service. You also have to learn the framework interfaces, which in this analogy is the same as learning how to use a telephone.
If you are interested in doing physics, a good HEP framework will save you much work. Next is a list of the more commonly used components of ROOT: Command Line Interpreter, Histograms and Fitting, Writing a Graphical User Interface, 2D Graphics, Input/Output , Collection Classes, Script Processor.
Less code to write - the programmer should be able to use and reuse the majority of the existing code. Basic functionality, such as fitting and histogramming are implemented and ready to use and customize.
More consistent and modular code - the code reuse provides consistency and common capabilities between programs, no matter who writes them. Frameworks make it easier to break programs into smaller pieces.
More focus on areas of expertise - users can concentrate on their particular problem domain. They do not have to be experts at writing user interfaces, graphics, or networking to use the frameworks that provide those services.
Now after we know in abstract terms what the ROOT framework is, let us look at the physical directories and files that come with the ROOT installation. You may work on a platform where your system administrator has already installed ROOT. You will need to follow the specific development environment for your setup and you may not have write access to the directories. In any case, you will need an environment variable called ROOTSYS, which holds the path of the top ROOT directory.
In the ROOTSYS directory are examples, executables, tutorials, header tutorials files, and, if you opted to download it, the source is here. The directories of special interest to us are bin, tutorials, lib, test, andinclude. The next figure shows the contents of these directories.
There are several ways to use ROOT, one way is to run the executable by typing root at the system prompt another way is to link with the ROOT libraries and make the ROOT classes available in your own program.
The libraries are designed and organized to minimize dependencies, such that you can load just enough code for the task at hand rather than having to load all libraries or one monolithic chunk. The core library (libCore.so) contains the essentials; it is a part of all ROOT applications. In the Figure 1-2 you see that libCore.so is made up of base classes, container classes, meta information classes, operating system specific classes, and the ZIP algorithm used for compression of the ROOT files.
The Cling library (libCling.so) is also needed in all ROOT applications, and even by libCore. A program referencing only TObject only needs libCore; libCling will be opened automatically. To add the ability to read and write ROOT objects one also has to load libRIO. As one would expect, none of that depends on graphics or the GUI.
When building your own executable you will have to link against the libraries that contain the classes you use. The ROOT reference guide states the library a class is reference guide defined in. Almost all relevant classes can be found in libraries returned by root-config -glibs; the graphics libraries are retuned by root-config --libs. These commands are commonly used in Makefiles. Using root-config instead of enumerating the libraries by hand allows you to link them in a platform independent way. Also, if ROOT library names change you will not need to change your Makefile.
When using a class in Cling, e.g. in an interpreted source file, ROOT will automatically load the library that defines this class. On start-up, ROOT parses all files ending on .rootmap rootmap that are in one of the $LD_LIBRARY_PATH (or $DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH for MacOS, or $PATH for Windows). They contain class names and the library names that the class depends on. After reading them, ROOT knows which classes are available, and which libraries to load for them.
When TSystem::Load("ALib") is called, ROOT uses this information to determine which libraries libALib.so depends on. It will load these libraries first. Otherwise, loading the requested library could cause a system (dynamic loader) error due to unresolved symbols.
fft: Fast Fourier Transform with the fftw package fit: Several examples illustrating minimization/fitting foam: Random generator in multidimensional space geom: Examples of use of the geometry package (TGeo classes) gl: Visualisation with OpenGL graphics: Basic graphics graphs: Use of TGraph, TGraphErrors, etc. gui: Scripts to create Graphical User Interface hist: Histogramming image: Image Processing io: Input/Output math: Maths and Statistics functions matrix: Matrices (TMatrix) examples mlp: Neural networks with TMultiLayerPerceptron net: Network classes (client/server examples) physics: LorentzVectors, phase space pyroot: Python tutorials pythia: Example with pythia8 quadp: Quadratic Programming smatrix: Matrices with a templated package spectrum: Peak finder, background, deconvolutions splot: Example of the TSplot class (signal/background estimator) sql: Interfaces to SQL (mysql, oracle, etc) thread: Using Threads tmva: Examples of the MultiVariate Analysis classes tree: Creating Trees, Playing with Trees unuran: Interface with the unuram random generator library xml: Writing/Reading xml files
You can execute the scripts in $ROOTSYS/tutorials (or sub-directories) by setting your current directory in the script directory or from any user directory with write access. Several tutorials create new files. If you have write access to the tutorials directory, the new files will be created in the tutorials directory, otherwise they will be created in the user directory.
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