Perl interface to Starlink NDF module
-------------------------------------------

The extensible N-dimensional data format (NDF) is a format for storing
bulk data in the form of N-dimensional arrays of numbers. It is
typically used for storing spectra, images and similar datasets with
higher dimensionality. The NDF format is based on the Hierarchical
Data System (HDS) and is extensible; not only does it provide a
comprehensive set of standard ancillary items to describe the data,
it can also be extended indefinitely to handle additional user-defined
information of any type.

NDF is the data format of choice for software distributed by the
Starlink Project (Rutherford Appleton Laboratory,
http://www.starlink.ac.uk/). It is widely used in the United Kingdom
astronomical community (for example in the Figaro data reduction
package).

This module provides a perl interface to the NDF libraries
that are supplied with the standard Starlink software distribution.

		Tim Jenness (t.jenness@jach.hawaii.edu)
                      12 July 2000

PDL
---

The Perl Data Language (PDL) distribution provides a module that can be
used to read NDF files into it. That module (PDL::IO::NDF) requires this
module to be installed.

The PDL module requires at least v1.99 of perldl.
The PDL home page can be found at http://pdl.perl.org/

Copyright
---------

This module is copyright (C) 1996-2012 Tim Jenness, Frossie Economou and
the UK Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council. All rights
reserved.  This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

The NDF library itself is copyrighted by the Starlink Project, CLRC.