We are trying to start writing the next newsletter as soon as the previous
one was sent out. We will build it up over time with paragraphs like this,
so that we will not forget to put them in. We will keep it with file name
Newsletter???.draft on ftp so that people can view it periodically to see
what was up.
Announcement of HDF3.3 Release 3
HDF3.3r3 is officially released today. It contains some improvements
in the SD interface, Vdata interface; fixed a couple memory leaks.
Operating systems Windows NT and Solaris are supported.
The HDF base library passed all tests on the Intel I860. See ABOUT_3.3r3
for more details.
The first official release of the HDF Reference
Manual V3.3
Many thanks for the feedback from HDF users on the draft
of HDF Reference Manual V3.3. We have revised the documentation
and its first officail version is now available on the NCSA ftp
server,in subdirectory Documentation/HDF3.3/Ref_Manual/.
The draft was moved to Documentation/HDF3.3/Ref_Manual_draft/ temporarily.
It will be removed from the ftp server on March 1, 1994.
Information about limits in HDF releases
The current implementation of HDF contains limits on certain aspects of
hdf files. Some of the limits are defined in the library, others are
implied by the number types of parameters which are used in HDF internally.
Recently several users' applications happened to reach one or another limits
which caused various error messages or core dumps. To address this problem,
a section of 'Limits of the current release' was inserted into the ABOUT_3.3r3.
A limits.html file is also available on the www HDF information server.
ANSI C in future versions
We raised the ANSI C issue in Newsletter12 dated Dec. 23, 1993.
Up to now very few responses have been received. Since it will probably affect
a certain number of HDF users, we are re-posting the section of
'ANSI C in HDF 4.0' of the Newsletter12 below hoping to draw users objections
and comments.
ANSI C in HDF 4.0
There has been some discussion among the members of the HDF
development team about the issue of our next major release (v4.0)
being primarily targeted towards the use of ANSI C conforming
compilers.
We would like to have v4.0 and all further releases of the HDF library
and utilities be written to only compile with ANSI C compilers. We
believe this will increase the clarity and maintainability of our
code.
In the interests of maintaining backwards compatibility with K&R C
compilers, we would distribute in the release Peter Deutsch's ansi2knr
tool which can convert ANSI C code into K&R compliant code. This would
allow older K&R C compilers continued access to new versions of the
library.
Please respond to Quincey Koziol at koziol@ncsa.uiuc.edu for future
correspondence on this issue.
Policy on Fortran 90 support for HDF
Some user's have asked the NCSA HDF group if we plan to support Fortran 90
versions of the HDF APIs. After some discussion, we have determined that
this would not be simple, for several reasons, including:
There are significant differences between Fortran 90 and
Fortran 77, which we currently do support
Fortran 90 compilers are not currently implented on many
platforms that HDF is currently supported on
Support for Fortran 90 should probably involve adding new
capabilities to the Fortran interface, such as support for
structures and dynamic memory allocation. Such capabilities
are desirable, but substantial resources are required to
implement them in HDF.
Hence, we have adopted the following policy on Fortran 90 support for HDF:
"The HDF library does not currently support Fortran 90 APIs for any of its
interfaces. The HDF group has no plans to support Fortran 90 APIs until a
compelling need is observed for such support, Fortran 90 compilers become
available on most platforms that HDF currently supports, and sufficient
resources can be obtained for implementing Fortran 90 APIs."
Update on NCSA Tools
XDataSlice 2.3.1 is now available on the NCSA ftp server, in
directory:
XDS2.3.1 fixes some memory leaks; allows 2 Colormaps (when using
the palette editor), one for the dicer images and one for the other
windows; includes more communication supports. Read the
README file in that directory lists for details about the new features
in XDS2.3.1.
New contributions
HDF3.2r2 ported to FreeBSD on IBM-PC 386/486.
Pedro Vazquez, vazquez@iqm.unicamp.br ported HDF3.2r2 and XDataSlice
to FreeBSD on IBM-PC 386/486. This HDF port suports all HDF features
under C and almost all under fortran. The library works with both
gnu f77 and f2c/gcc. The library was used to compile XDataSlice and
it's able to read hdf files created on Suns and IBM as well create
hdf files readable by these machines, no byte order problems.