6 Programming Notes

This section describes some of the basic features of the library in comparison with the VAX version:

• The library provides only read access.
• Only VAX binary GSD files can be read.
• Bad values in the file are converted to PRIMDAT bad values[6], which differ from the traditional VAX/GSD bad values. (This conversion is in memory only, the file itself is unchanged.)
• Type conversion is possible only between numeric types (including logical). Numeric to character or character to numeric conversion is not provided by the library.