Occam's Razor and attributes

[Jon Tischler]

Regarding Chris's note on Vgroups vs. attributes.  I thought that HDF
implemented SDS's as a particular kind of Vgroup, just as Chris is
suggesting.  So if you wanted to, you could probably create an SDS and
attach other Vgroups, SDS's, ... to it (though that would probably be a
dangerous thing to do).

By changing each SDS to a Vgroup, we are reinventing the HDF interface.
This will make it particularly difficult on those using a generic HDF
interface to read files written by NeXus (e.g. IDL).  I feel the closer we
stay to HDF the more generally accepted NeXus will be, and the less chance
of future problems.


Jon




Jon Tischler
Oak Ridge National Lab
TischlerJZ at ornl.gov