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Implementation of imaging and deconvolution algorithms inside GILDAS
started in the early nighties. The first implementation was made as a
collection of independent programs, called tasks in the GILDAS
environment, and activated through the RUN command in the GRAPHIC
program. The main advantage was the ease of programing, the main drawback
was the lack of user-friendliness. To tackle this drawback, two different
approaches were used.
- First, the calling of tasks were hidden through the call to SIC
procedures (the GO and INPUT families of scripts) whose
behaviors was modified by global variables. The activation of the tasks
and the development of the SIC procedures happened in a preexisting
program, called GRAPHIC which also contained the tools to visualize
and analyze the spectra cubes.
- Second, a single, big program, called MAPPING, was developed with
flexibility in mind, e.g. the possibility to interactively define
supports where to search for clean components. The support for
deconvolution of mosaics was built only in MAPPING. The same procedure
names were used in MAPPING and GRAPHIC to obtain the same
look-and-feel.
Up to 2003, there thus were two GILDAS program, i.e. MAPPING and
GRAPHIC, which offered slightly different services with procedures
sharing the same names. The status of the GRAPHIC program was difficult
to understand as it shared similarities with the GREG program (which
defines all the drawing commands of GILDAS) and with the MAPPING
program. We thus decided during the 2003 change of GILDAS architecture
to transfer the visualization and analysis capacities of GRAPHIC in
GREG and the imaging and deconvolution capacities of GRAPHIC in
MAPPING. The GRAPHIC program was deprecated and we made the GREG
and MAPPING program able to understand the graphic extension of
procedure files for backward compatibility. The major drawback of this
decision is the fact that we currently have in the same program (i.e.
MAPPING) both tasks, procedures and commands to do similar but slightly
different things. Not much happened following this step due to manpower
shortage in the GILDAS team. Our goal in the coming years is to clean
this situation by ensuring that both tasks and commands use the same
FORTRAN code. Our first main step is to update the documentation.
Next: Cookbook for the impatient
Up: The structure of the
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Gildas manager
2014-07-01