Pending issues

A number of items in the GDFV2 header have been kept for backwards compatibility only. They may change in the future, when writing the GDFV1 format will no longer be supported.

• %loca%getvm
  This is clearly obsolescent, and perhaps can be removed from the gildas derived type. Only SIC is likely to use this now. No application do so any longer.

• %loca%addr
  This is now only used internally in SIC and by a few routines in CLIC, and one task of CLASS (map_ekh. They are defined by applying locwrd to the appropriate array.

  The idea is to suppress this at some point.

• Rank of data set
  A problem with the current code is the variable rank of the data. It would be convenient to use the new Fortran 2003 to have always a rank-1 array declared, and using the Fortran 2003 capability of reshaping through a different rank pointer using this rank-1 array as a target. e.g. for a 2-D Real image:

  h%r2d(1:h%gil%dim(1), h%gil%dim(2)) => h%real

  Allocation would be only of the h%real array, so that automatic deallocation could be easily made when freeing the image. At least, we would always know the data array name when no interface is required...

  Unfortunately, this is only possible with the latest version of the compilers being used so far (ifort 12.0 and gfortran 4.8.0).

  In the meantime, tools have been developped to adjust the rank of an image to the user need when possible (see rank= optional argument in GDF_READ_GILDAS and GDF_READ_HEADER.