Hi Steve,
| Thanks for your comments. We (the Ferret developers) understand the
| situation and agree with your points. For several years we have been
| encouraging Ferret users of netCDF to solve the problems of file
| aggregation through the more advanced techniques offered by NcML and the
| Unidata TDS server. Understandably, there have been many Ferret users
| for whom the effort of setting up a TDS was simply more than they were
| willing to undertake. In order to support those users we have kept
| alive the Namelist-based technique for file aggregation. Despite its
| imperfections with respect to portability, it is effective in most cases.
There seems to me to be some misunderstanding.
I don't have any objections to the namelist-based technique.
The namelist-based technique is portable, as long as the users
use the standard-conforming syntax, which is something like
&namelistname
itemone = blahblah,
itemtwo = foofoo,
/
That's all I say.
As a footnote, if you use a pure F77 compiler the above may
not work because namelist wasn't in the F77 standard. In that
sense, namelist isn't perfectly portable. But, it's harder
and harder to find a pure F77 compiler. These days, most
Fortran compilers are F90-conforming, meaning in particular
that they support namelist of the syntax above. In addition,
even so-called F77 compilers tend to support the F90 syntax
of namelist. For example, g77 does. (Or did. I don't find
g77 any longer for the OS I use. It's replaced by gfortran.)
Regards,
Ryo