Minuit Versions.

The program is entirely in standard portable Fortran 77, and requires no external subroutines except those defined as part of the Fortran 77 standard and one logical function INTRAC . The only difference between versions for different computers, apart from INTRAC, is the floating point precision (see heading below). As with previous releases, Minuit does not use a memory manager. This makes it easy to install and independent of other programs, but has the disadvantage that both the memory occupation and the maximum problem size (number of parameters) are fixed at compilation time. The old solution to this problem, which consisted of providing ``long'' and ``short'' versions, has proved to be somewhat clumsy and anyway insufficient for really exceptional users, so it has been abandoned in favour of a single ``standard'' version. The currently``standard'' version of Minuit will handle functions of up to 100 parameters, of which not more than 50 can be variable at one time. Because of the use of the PARAMETER statement in the Fortran source, redimensioning for larger (or smaller) versions is very easy (although it will help to have a source code manager or a good editor to propagate the modified PARAMETER statement through all the subroutines, and of course it implies recompilation). The definition of what is ``standard'' may well change in the light of experience (it was 35 instead of 50 variable parameters for release 89.05), and it is likely that different installations will wish to define it differently according to their own applications. In any case, the dimensions used at compilation time are printed in the program header at execution time, and the program is of course protected against the user trying to define too many parameters. The user who finds that the version available to him is too small (or too big) must try to convince his computer manager to change the installation default or to provide an additional special version, or else he must obtain the source and recompile his own version.