[mesa-users] Inlist issue

[Josiah Schwab]

Hi All,

I wanted to take a minute and pedagogically describe what is going on
here for future reference.

The first, and most important point is that you can't do math in
inlists.  So as Frank says, the solution is to write out your numbers.

Now if you were to try to do some other math operation, for example,

  am_D_mix_factor = 1d0 + 1d0

you'd receive an error.

However, the character '/' ends a fortran namelist.  That is, one
normally writes something like

&controls

  am_D_mix_factor = 0.03333

/ ! end of controls namelist

where the comment is informative, but syntactically irrelevant.

So when you write

&controls

  am_D_mix_factor = 1d0/30d0
  some_other_option = 'something'

/ ! end of controls namelist

the namelist ends immediately at the first '/'.  So everything beyond
(i.e. the 30d0 and any subsequent options) will be ignored, because it
is located outside of the controls namelist.

As you found, this mistake can be insidious because it will not produce
an error message.  MESA will simply run with the truncated inlist.

Josiah