Version 3.3.1 of NetCDF Now Available

An update to netCDF version 3.3 that works on more systems and fixes a few bugs in the utilities is now available. Detailed release notes are available with the software, but the changes are also summarized here.

Changes From Version 3.3

Previously, to get the number of global attributes you had to call a dataset-level inquire function. It is now also possible to get the number of global attributes by specifying the "global variable ID" to a variable inquire function.

The library can now be built from source on a Win32 system.

The FORTRAN interface should now work on more systems. In particular:

• It should now work with FORTRAN compilers whose "integer*1" datatype is either a C "signed char", "short", or "int" and whose "integer*2" datatype is either a C "short" or "int".
• It should now work with FORTRAN compilers that are extremely picky about source code formatting (e.g. the NAG f90 compiler).

EXTERNAL statements have been added to the FORTRAN include-file "netcdf.inc" to eliminate excessive warnings about "unused" variables (which were actually functions) by some compilers (e.g. SunOS 4.1.3's f77(1) version 1.x).

The Fortran output generated under the "-f" option of ncgen is improved, using portable automatic conversion with netCDF-3 interfaces instead of non-standard "BYTE", "INTEGER*1", or "INTEGER*2" declarations.

The C++ interface will now compile the C++ library with Digital's cxx compiler.

A bug that caused ncdump to report "Attempt to convert between text & numbers" when the _FillValue attribute of a character variable was set to the empty string "" is now fixed.

Various bugs in ncgen are now fixed, including handling byte attributes on platforms on which char is unsigned, initializing scalar character variables in generated C code under "-c" option, interspersing DATA statements with declaration statements in generated Fortran code under "-f" option, handling the empty string as a value in generated C and Fortran code, and handling escape characters in strings.

The dependency on the non-POSIX utility m4(1) for generating the C and FORTRAN manual pages has been eliminated.

Building the netCDF-3 package no longer requires the existence of the Standard C macro RAND_MAX.

The netCDF-3 release is available in source form as a compressed tar file from <URL:ftp://ftp.unidata.ucar.edu/pub/netcdf/netcdf.tar.Z>. Binary versions are available for many platforms from <URL:ftp://ftp.unidata.ucar.edu/pub/binary/>.