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Re: CIF line limits

I know where Nick is coming from. Yes, FORTRAN is dead and gone... but
we are still running some of the country's best and most modern neutron
instruments on VAXes with software written in -- guess what language. We
are not alone in this. I suspect that at most a third of the world's
major neutron diffractometers have been upgraded to linux (or downgraded
to ...). The majority still run on VAXes.

In reality, a longer length CIF record length in would probably have
little in the way of ramifications, but I mention the above to
demonstrate that the world of computers as seen by the informatics folks
may not reflect the range of hardware used by those of us in the
trenches. Thus, I think it very important to preserve backward
compatibility. If this means keeping an 80 character limit on data name
length, I urge those of you with votes to retain this requirement.

Brian

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Brian H. Toby, Ph.D.                    Leader, Crystallography Team
Brian.Toby@NIST.gov      NIST Center for Neutron Research, Stop 8562
voice: 301-975-4297     National Institute of Standards & Technology
FAX: 301-921-9847                        Gaithersburg, MD 20899-8562
                http://www.ncnr.nist.gov/xtal
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