New CFITSIO Release

[William Pence]

                          CFITSIO 1.40 Release
                            11 February 1998

A new version of the CFITSIO library for reading and writing FITS
format data files is now available.  This release contains several
significant new features that affect both C and Fortran users of the
CFITSIO and FITSIO libraries:


New For C Programmers:
______________________

CFITSIO can now directly read compressed FITS files in gzip (.gz) or
Unix compress (.Z) formats.  Users can save time and disk space by
reading the compressed FITS file instead of having to uncompress it
first.

FITS files can be read from the 'stdin' file stream and written out to
the 'stdout' stream.  Just specify the input or output FITS file name
as "-" (a minus sign) to use this feature.  This enables a sequence of
programs to pass FITS files from one to the other in memory thus
speeding up the processing compared with having to create intermediate
FITS files on disk.

This release introduces a powerful new function called the 'iterator'
for reading and writing data in FITS images or tables.  This function
can simplify the way software reads and writes images or columns of
data, and make the code more 'object oriented' by cleanly separating
the data I/O from the algorithms that operate on the data.  This
routine can greatly reduce the number of lines of code that are needed
to read or write the data and can improve the efficiency of the program
at the same time.  Several sample programs that use this iterator
function are included in this release.

The User's Guide has been restructured to make it easier and faster to
learn to use CFITIO.  The most commonly used 'basic' interface routines
have been grouped into one chapter for easy reference.  Several new
high-level routines have also been added to simplify the interface by
combining what used to require several function calls into one call.


New for Fortran Programmers:
___________________________

CFITSIO (written in ANSI C) now includes a set of Fortran-callable
wrapper routines which effectively replace the old FITSIO Fortran
library.  These new CFITSIO wrappers have exactly the same calling
sequence as the old FITSIO routines, so any Fortran program that
currently uses the FITSIO library can now be linked instead to the
CFITSIO library without any change to the source code.  The main
advantage of using these new CFITSIO wrappers instead of FITSIO are:

  - they support the new features in CFITSIO (like reading compressed
    FITS files, and the new iterator function) that are not available
    in FITSIO.

  - they are generally faster, by a factor of 2 in some cases.

These C wrappers work on most Unix platforms, including linux, and on
VMS systems.  They currently are not supported on Cray supercomputers
and on Windows PCs and Macs.

Fortran programmers are urged to start using the CFITSIO library
because support for FITSIO will now be limited to simple bug fixes and
will not include any new features added to CFITSIO.


Where to get it:
________________

CFITSIO is available on the web or by anonymous ftp from: 


   http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/fitsio
   ftp://legacy.gsfc.nasa.gov/software/fitsio/c

_________________________________________________________________________ 
William Pence
HEASARC - High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center
NASA/GSFC
e-mail: pence at tetra.gsfc.nasa.gov
phone: (301)286-4599