Physics Analysis Workstation

PAW screen capture

The Physics Analysis Workstation (PAW) is an interactive, scriptable computer software tool for data analysis and graphical presentation in High Energy Physics (HEP).

The development of this software tool started at CERN in 1986, it was optimized for the processing very large amounts of data. It was based on and intended for inter-operation with components of CERNLIB, an extensive collection of Fortran libraries.

PAW has been a standard tool in high energy physics for decades, yet is essentially unmaintained.^[1] Despite continuing popularity as of 2008, it has recently been losing ground to the C++-based ROOT package.

Sample script

PAW uses its own scripting language. Here's a sample code (with its actual output), which can be used to plot data gathered in files.

* read data
vector/read X,Y input_file.dat

* eps plot

fort/file 55 gg_ggg_dsig_dphid_179181.eps
meta 55 -113

opt linx   | linear scale
opt logy   | logarithmic scale

* here goes plot

set plci 1       | line color
set lwid 2       | line width
set dmod 1       | line type (solid, dotted, etc.)
graph 32 X Y AL   | 32 stands for input data lines in input file

* plot title and comments

set txci 1
atitle '[f] (deg)' 'd[s]/d[f]! (mb)'

set txci 1
text 180.0 2e1 '[f]=179...181 deg' 0.12

close 55

References

External links

• PAW (at CERN)
• The PAW History Seen by the CERN Computer News Letters
• CERNLIB (at CERN)
• ROOT (at CERN)