File I/O, Arrays, and Databases in Revolution

[Dennis F. Kahlbaum]

I'm new to Revolution (I'm a long-time FORTRAN programmer), and am
having trouble understanding how file input/output, arrays, and
databases work in this package.

Here is some background and my problems/questions:

I've created several complex air pollution modeling programs in
FORTRAN.  I want to use Revolution to act as the GUI interface to and
from these programs.  As a result, Revolution must read and write files
which the FORTRAN programs use or create.  Every line of these files are
of mixed type: character fields, integer number fields, real number
fields, scientific notation fields, etc.  In looking at the Revolution
documentation, it appears that I have to somehow read or write each line
as a string, then somehow parse each field from this string.  So how do
you do this efficiently in Revolution?   Please note that the files
created by the FORTRAN programs are fairly large.

The next question is how are arrays implemented in Revolution?. I've
searched the documentation but haven't found anything.  What I'd like to
do is read in the FORTRAN files, putting the data into Revolution arrays
for display or calculational analysis.  How can this be done?

Finally, I tam interested in the database capabilities of Revolution
(especially the Valentina engine).  I'd like to read in the data from
the FORTRAN files and directly put them into a database so that
information can be searched, manipulated, calculated. etc.  How can this
be done?

I realize these are complex questions. But the use of Revolution for
this project hinges on how well this can be done with the package.

Any help or guidance will be greatly appreciated.

Dennis F. Kahlbaum
University of Michigan