A museum of crystallographic software

Armel Le Bail, Université du Maine, Le Mans, France; original creator of the crystallographic source code museum.

Crystallographic software constitutes one of the main expert knowledge bases within the field of crystallography (see the recent leading article on Age Concern). With this in mind, a crystallographic source code museum was first created by Armel Le Bail at the Université du Maine, Le Mans, France in 1999, where it was subsequently found to be a useful resource by a number of software developers wishing to peruse old code and ideas. With the permission of Dr Le Bail, this Source Code Museum has now been transferred to the IUCr Computing Commission website where it can still be added to.

This collection contains source code for crystallographic programs that are either no longer actively maintained or have a version archived at one or more significant points in their historical development. The algorithms, ideas and science within the code are normally far more important than the style of coding (spaghetti or otherwise), or the programming language. Therefore, crystallographic source code of any type, style and age can be submitted (as a zip file) for inclusion into the museum by contacting the Chair of the Computing Commission.