4.4 Compound Types
In netCDF-4 files it's possible to create a data type which
corresponds to a C struct. These are known as “compound” types
(following HDF5 nomenclature).
That is, a netCDF compound type is a data structure which contains an
arbitrary collection of other data types, including other compound
types.
To define a new compound type, use nc_def_compound. Then call
nc_insert_compound for each type within the compound type.
Read and write arrays of compound data with the nc_get_vara and
nc_put_vara functions. These functions were actually part of the
netCDF-2 API, brought out of semi-retirement to handle user-defined
types in netCDF-4.
