iraf.net

Hi. Couple questions about the CDL.

What is its current development status?

The FTP site

ftp://iraf.noao.edu/iraf/x11iraf/

lists cdl-1.9.tar.gz as the latest version, while x11iraf-v2.0BETA comes bundled with a version which I believe is an independent branch stemming from 1.8.

Have there been any unreleased changes since 1.9?

I'm curious if there are still use cases that require the pre-ANSI C support (for instance with the function prototypes via the ANSI_FUNC flag).

Cheers,
Jason

CDL is essentially frozen at the moment. The 1.9 release came out after the last X11IRAF but wasn't enough of a change (and there are probably too few users) to justify a new X11IRAF build. The latest version I have is from 5/2013 which I believe is the 1.9 release.

The ANSI_FUNC stuff was done when the package was first written in '97 and probably isn't needed now, but I'm sure there are other code cleanups that could be done as well.

Hi, Mike. Another question about cdl.

In x11iraf2.0BETA's cdl version there are some "subraster" functions (com_readSubraster() and com_writeSubraster()) and "raw buffer" functions (imd_readRawBuf() and imd_writeRawBuf()) which are not present in the standalone cdl 1.8 cdl 1.9. Do you recall the status of this functionality? As I previously wrote, I think 2.0BETA's cdl developed from 1.8 and not from 1.9 so I'm wondering if the above functionality was forgotten to be ported to 1.9 from 2.0BETA or if it was purposely removed from 1.9.

Jason

Hi Jason,

As I remember, the cdl_read/writeSubRaster() was an extension added as part of an image handling system I built for a new (at the time) instrument. It was a mosaic camera and these allowed direct I/O to each ccd subraster for much faster (up to 200X) displays since in the normal IIS protocol a subraster is done using entire rows of the frame buffer. Mine was the only known client to use this feature and it required a small modification to XImtool to be used and so probably explains why it wasn't widely released other than to be called v1.9.1. I'd have to check whether the released XImtool has the needed change as well, however I know it was never implemented in DS9 and so subraster displays behave as they always did.