Dwarf: The Dwingeloo-Westerbork Astronomical Reduction Facility

Summary

After an introduction summarizing the reasons for developing DWARF, those aspects which in our view distinguish it from other data processing environments are presented. Subjects covered are:

• The rationale for committing ourselves to VAX/VMS.

• The program parameter interface as seen by the user; defaulting mechanisms; generation of multiple functionally distinct versions of a single program.

• Messages, logging and file history.

• The tree-structured data file catalogue.

• Virtual vs programmed I/O.

• Processing of files from different sources with different layouts though one table-driven interface.

• The major benefits of using dynamic core for control arrays.