paw

PAW, in its most prominent and historical use, refers to the Physics Analysis Workstation, a data-analysis software package developed at CERN. Introduced in the late 1980s, PAW provided interactive analysis, histogramming, and plotting capabilities for high-energy physics data within the CERNLIB environment and was built on the HBOOK library. It supported batch and interactive use and offered macro scripting to automate analyses. PAW was widely used on experiments at CERN and in collaborating laboratories, enabling researchers to perform data selection, fitting, and visualization without relying on external commercial software. The software relied on its own data formats and libraries, and it formed a central component of many analysis workflows for a period.

As data-analysis ecosystems evolved, ROOT emerged as the dominant framework, offering improved performance, modern graphics, and broader support. In response, PAW’s development and maintenance gradually declined, and it was largely superseded in most workflows by ROOT during the 1990s and early 2000s. Today, PAW survives mainly in historical studies and legacy analyses, with only limited ongoing use in some niche or archival contexts.

PAW is also an acronym used in other contexts, referring to different organizations, projects, or concepts in various fields. Because meanings vary by discipline and region, the acronym PAW can be ambiguous, and disambiguation is often necessary when the term is encountered.