Subject: Re: FITSIO in C

From: William Pence <pence at tetra.gsfc.nasa.gov>
Date: Mon, 28 Nov 1994 17:07:01 -0500

> 
> Does anyone out there know if FITSIO has ever been translated into
> C? I know of the C wrappers created for the Fortran routines but
> was thinking of purely C code for the routines themselves.
>  
There is no pure C version that I know of.  It would be a lot
of work to duplicate and maintain a separate C version of FITSIO
so it is much more practical to just provide the simple C wrappers.

A new CFITSIO version is now in development that should be easier and
more natural for C programmers to use.  Instead of the large set of C
wrapper routines that need to be compiled into a C library, the new
CFITSIO will consist of a single cfitsio.h header file that defines all
the FITSIO macro calls, and that will need to be 'included' in any C
program that calls FITSIO.   The C program will then just have to be
linked with the single (Fortran) FITSIO library.  This new version
should be available in January 1995.

-Bill Pence