Journal of

GEOsciences

  (Formerly Journal of the Czech Geological Society)

Original Paper

Vojtěch Janoušek

NORMAN, a QuickBasic programme for petrochemical re-calculation of whole-rock major-element analyses on IBM PC

Journal of the Czech Geological Society, volume 46 (2001), issue 1-2, 9 - 14

NORMAN is a Microsoft QuickBasic 4.5 package designed for handling and recalculation of whole-rock major-element data from igneous and metamorphic rocks on PC compatible computers. It is capable of computing parameters of the most common normative calculation schemes, including CIPW and Catanorm. The core of the system consists of modules to handle the import, editing and saving of the major-element analyses, as well as browsing, saving and exporting the computed results.
The calculation algorithms are: (1) nearly independent QuickBasic programmes (“standard modules”), and (2) plain text calculation scripts (“user-defined functions”) that may contain variables referring to the original data, to constants as well as to parameters calculated by other standard modules and user-defined functions.
The advantage of the chosen approach is the simplicity, availability and open architecture that enables an average user not only to follow, but also, if need be, to modify the algorithms applied to his data.