C Glossary

The following is a loose list of terms used throughout the WIP manual, and perhaps not always explained in detail.

ASCII --

  A numeric code standard for characters. Literally, ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. This is the most common character to integer translation code.

BASIC --

  An image type used by WIP to reflect many different image formats. The Basic image file is generally a binary file with an optional header section followed by the packed data. The image name used with the image    command generally describes the format of the data and the size of the optional header section.

BIMA

The Berkeley-Illinois-Maryland Association.

C-shell --

In UNIX, this is one of the possible shells that can be used to communicate with UNIX. Other shells are tcsh (the T-shell), sh (the Bourne Shell), and bash (the GNU Shell).

FITS --

   This stands for the Flexible Image Transport System and is a standard data format used to interchange and archive data between different computers. It can be used for image as well as other types of data.

host --

Your local computer. The term host is often used as in host interpreter and host commands, and is really meant to warn you that in this context commands may differ depending on which host/machine (often VMS versus UNIX) you work.

Miriad --

  The Multichannel Image Reconstruction, Image Analysis and Display data reduction package is developed by the BIMA group and is used here to refer to the format of the images generated with that package.

PGPLOT --

  A graphics subroutine package developed by Tim Pearson at Caltech used to generate publication quality graphics on various graphic display devices. The PGPLOT subroutines are the graphics routines used by WIP.

PostScript file --

  An ASCII  text file in the PostScript language. PostScript is a page description language, and has become an industry standard for printing high quality text and graphics. There are PGPLOT  device drivers which can create a PostScript file. This file can be sent to a printer to get hardcopy output.

READLINE --

The Readline Library     is a set of routines for providing Emacs style line input distributed by the Free Software Foundation. The library is not included within the WIP distribution. If, however, it is present on the system when WIP is built, then a compile time option can incorporate the library into the user interface of WIP providing Emacs style command line recall and editing.

shell --

A supposedly easier to handle front-end command processor used to communicate with a lower level, and often more difficult to handle program or operating system.

WIPHELP --

  The name of the on-line help file. This environment variable defines the full directory path and file name of the file used by WIP to present on-line help.

X-WINDOWS --

  The name of a windowing environment developed by MIT and available (free) via anonymous ftp.