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Re: 960416: netCDF comments

>From: Peter Halvorson <address@hidden>
>Organization: Siemens Power Corp
>Keywords: 199604162046.AA28213

Hi Peter,

> First let me congratulate you on an excellent piece of software.  Over
> the last few months I've been building a wish list of things I wish I
> could do with the data files passing data between our programs and I'm
> amazed to find every one available in your library (units, formats,
> descriptions, random access, ...).  The units conversion library is
> just the cherry on top.
> 
> Compilation went fine on our HP workstations, up in ten minutes.
> Documentation is excellent, in a few hours I had a simple example
> matching the way we generate data.

Thanks for taking the time to tell us what you like about netCDF.  That kind
of positive feedback really helps.  I've forwarded your comments about the
udunits package to its author, Steve Emmerson.

> I did have one hitch which may cause other people problems.  In
> the second version of my FORTRAN example program, I added a function
> named strlen (which determine the non-blank length of a FORTRAN string).
> After doing this, the library ceased working properly because the C 
> strlen routine used by the library was replaced by my strlen function.
> 
> The solution for me was to pick a different name for my strlen function,
> but I don't know what other names may cause problems in the future.  I'm
> not sure if there is a general solution.

This may be an HP-specific problem, since conventions for calling C and
Fortran functions on other platforms permit the same name to be used for
both a Fortran function and a C function (by appending "_" to the names of
Fortran externals before linking, for example).

The names of all externals in the library or called by the library can be
generated using the Unix "nm" command, with something like

  nm -g libnetcdf.a

--Russ

______________________________________________________________________________

Russ Rew                                           UCAR Unidata Program
address@hidden                              http://www.unidata.ucar.edu