On Thu, 31 Aug 1995, Paula Fitzgerald wrote: > There is a slight problem, though, in that I am the only one seeing a lot of > this traffic, as people are still sending many of their questions or comments > as mail to me instead of as postings to the list. I get the feeling from > comments a couple of people have made that they are new to mmCIF, and don't > quite understand all of the ins and outs, and consquently they are a little > shy about revealing their ignorance in front of an audience of experts. I'd like to reinforce this point: 1) If you post to the list, Paula won't get lots of mails all asking the same question, and as more people start taking an interest, they can check the mail archive to see if their points have already been answered. 2) No-one will laugh at you because you ask a dumb question (besides, the chances are that it isn't dumb anyway). People will get upset, though, if you write software which interprets CIF's in a different way from other programs, because you didn't have the nerve to ask about something which you weren't sure about. 3) If you post to the list, people other than Paula can take up points that are raised. In this spirit, I think that Herb's question about aliases in a save-frame with loops deserves a more detailed answer, and I'm posting it to the DDL list. (If you're not on the DDL list, pick it up in a day or two from http://ndbserver.rutgers.edu/DDL/mail/index.html). 4) I don't know about the rest of you, but I'd like to have some idea as to how many other people are working on this. No-one here at Bath understands what I'm doing, and it can get lonely here at times! :-) Regards, Peter. ======================================================================== Peter Keller. \ "We kill the cows to make jackets out of Dept. of Biology and \ them, and then we kill each other for the Biochemistry, \ jackets we made out of the cows." University of Bath, \ --- Denis Leary Bath, BA2 7AY, UK. \ ------------------------------\----------------------------------------- Tel. (+44/0)1225 826826 x 4302 | Email: P.A.Keller@bath.ac.uk (Internet) Fax. (+44/0)1225 826449 | P.A.Keller%bath.ac.uk@UKACRL (BITNET) ========================================================================