B.6 What's Missing?
The new C interface omits three "record I/O" functions, ncrecput,
ncrecget, and ncrecinq, from the netCDF-2 interface, although these
functions are still supported via the netCDF-2 compatibility
interface.
This means you may have to replace one record-oriented call with
multiple type-specific calls, one for each record variable. For
example, a single call to ncrecput can always be replaced by multiple
calls to the appropriate NF_PUT_VAR functions, one call for each
variable accessed. The record-oriented functions were omitted, because
there is no simple way to provide type-safety and automatic type
conversion for such an interface.
There is no function corresponding to the nctypelen function from the
version 2 interface. The separation of internal and external types and
the new type-conversion interfaces make nctypelen unnecessary. Since
users read into and write out of native types, the sizeof operator is
perfectly adequate to determine how much space to allocate for a
value.
In the previous library, there was no checking that the characters
used in the name of a netCDF object were compatible with CDL
restrictions.
Now this restriction is
also enforced by the library for creation of new dimensions,
variables, and attributes. Previously existing components with less
restrictive names will still work OK.
