576 Chapter 10. Software for Data Analysis
called CINT, developed independently by Masa Goto in Japan. CINT has been
integrated into ROOT for its command line and script processing.
ROOT is a freely available software and is open source, meaning that its source
code is also available for novel users to make modifications. This approach has
enabled the users in the scientific community to modify the segments of the program
independently and then make the modified code available to the general users. Hence
from its inception, the software can be said to be in continuous development.
Although ROOT was originally developed to tackle analysis tasks encountered
in high energy physics, however it is in no way limited to this field and is being
successfully used in a variety of disciplines.
ROOT has an object oriented framework. This means that the utilities that are
commonly needed for analysis have already been provided and the user can simply
use them to develop a custom analysis code. One of the main advantages of this
approach is that it shrinks considerably the amount of code that must be written.
Other advantages includecustomizationof the utilities and their repeated usage. Of
course ROOT has inherited these aspects from the object oriented nature of C++.
A.1 Availability
ROOT can be downloaded free of charge from its dedicated server: http://root.cern.ch.
At the time of writing this book, the developers claim it to have been successfully
tested on the following platforms.
Intel x86 Linux (g++, egcs and KAI/KCC)Intel Itanium Linux (g++)AMD x86 64 (Athlon64 and Opteron) (FC gcc)HP HP-UX 10.x (HP CC and aCC, egcs1.2 C++ compilers)IBM AI X 4.1 (x1.c compiler and egcs1.2)Sun Solaris for SPARC (SUN C++ compiler and egcs)Sun Solaris for x86 (SUN C++ compiler)Sun Solaris for x86 (KAI/KCC)Compaq Alpha OSF1 (egcs1.2 and DEC/CXX)Compaq Alpha Linux (egcs1.2)SGI Irix (g++, KAI/KCC and SGI C++ compiler)Windows NT and Windows95 (Visual C++ compiler)Mac Mk Linux and Linux PPC (g++)Hitachi HI-UX (egcs)Mac OS (Code Warrior, no graphics)