CFITSIO.pm - a new Perl module

[Pete Ratzlaff]

I have put together an initial release of something I started working on
a couple of weeks ago: A module for using William Pence's CFITSIO subroutine
library.

Virtually all functions are available, and for the most part
work. There are some small glitches with unkown causes on
different architectures. The most serious problem thus far is
that fits_open_file() causes a segfault on Solaris 2.5, Perl 5.004.
This makes the module essentially unusable for that combination,
and is completely dumbfounding since the xsub for fits_open_file()
is simple and straightforward.

Anyhow, I have numbered this release 0.10, but consider it much
further along than that number would indicate. Aside from a handful
of problems, in fact, I would consider it mostly finished.

Some features:

*   Over 300 CFITSIO library routines available

*   Automatic conversion from Perl <-> C datatypes

*   If given scalar reference as input data, uses the data in the
    scalar rather than unpacking it. This is mostly for PDL and
    the use of its get_dataref() method.

*   Routines which read FITS files default to having the ouptut data
    packed into N-dimensional Perl arrays. This can be changed with
    a state-controlling function - PerlyUnpacking() - to reading data
    into a form compatible with PDL (i.e, scalars).

*   Thanks to Karl Glazebrook for his PGPLOT module, which gave me a
    place to begin and a bunch of ideas and code to steal.

Okay, if you want to give it a shot, try
    http://hea-www.harvard.edu/~rpete/cfitsio

For more information on the CFITSIO library, see
    http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/software/fitsio/fitsio.html


-Pete Ratzlaff <pratzlaff at cfa.harvard.edu>