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Re: netCDF naming conventions

>To: address@hidden
>From: Reimar Bauer <address@hidden>
>Subject: Re: 20030610: netCDF naming conventions
>Organization: Institut fuer Stratosphaerische Chemie (ICG-I)
>Keywords: names, valid characters

Reimar,

> Russ Rew wrote:
> | Hi Reimar,
> |
> | Now that it looks like we will finally have some resources to work on
> | netCDF again (starting in June), I will get this  change into
> | netCDF 3.5.1 before it goes out of beta.  Sorry it has taken so long,
> | but we have had no resources for netCDF development during the last
> | year, and only .25 programmer for support.
> |
> | I think I will just make a small change to the C library to permit
> | ":", "@", "(", and ")" in names, but not make the necessary fixes to
> | ncdump/ncgen or change the documentation until ncdump/ncgen are fixed
> | to permit the symbols as well (which may have to wait for netcdf 3.6
> | or 4).
> |
> | --Russ
> 
> 
> Dear Russ,
> 
> please give me a small note about the status of this reimplementation.
> 
> We are trying to use netcdf-3.5.1-beta10 on Cray and the signs not
> implemented now.

The change is implemented and tested in an 3.5.1 alpha version, but
it's not released yet.  We just hired a student programmer yesterday
to begin working on netCDF, and will be hiring another software
engineer in the next month.  There are other changes as well that are
going into the final 3.5.1 release, but we'll try to get an updated
beta release out soon.  As Piet Hein used to say, Things Take Time.

Just for your information, that change was fairly trivial:

Index: string.c
===================================================================
RCS file: /upc/share/CVS/netcdf-3/libsrc/string.c,v
retrieving revision 1.57
diff -r1.57 string.c
33a34,36
>  * Also permit ':', '@', '(', or ')' in names for chemists currently making 
>  * use of these characters, but don't document until ncgen and ncdump can 
>  * also handle these characters in names.
49a53,54
>                       if(ch != '_' && ch != '-' && ch != '.' && 
>                          ch != ':' && ch != '@' && ch != '(' && ch != ')')

--Russ