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Re: CIF development strategies

  • Subject: Re: CIF development strategies
  • From: "Richard G. Ball" <richard_ball@xxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Fri, 5 May 2000 17:04:34 +0100 (BST)
On May 5,  4:17pm, Brian McMahon wrote:
>
> Is there a need for a lightweight subroutine library to input data in
> a specific order? Is that achievable in Fortran in any more efficient way
> than CIFtbx?

Brian,

I'd probably argue that fortran is simply an unnecessarily complex tool to
use to manipulate a CIF. Certainly on a unix system it is far simpler to
concatenate other tools to prepare input files from a CIF and creating (when
necessary) those tools in languages other than fortran where one has direct
support for associative arrays (the fundamental dataname-dataitem paradigm)
and regular-expression parsing is much more effective. Once you have the
associative array populated with the dataitems you no longer have to worry
about order of input, it is all there wating for you and you can feed it to
you fortran program via an input stream or file in any order you want.

Richard

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