The Fortran subdirectory contains wrappers, written in C, that allow Fortran programs to use WCSLIB. The wrappers have no associated C header files, nor C function prototypes, as they are only meant to be called by Fortran code. Hence the C code must be consulted directly to determine the argument lists. This resides in files with names of the form *_f.c. However, there are associated Fortran INCLUDE files that declare function return types and various parameter definitions. There are also BLOCK DATA modules, in files with names of the form *_data.f, used solely to initialise error message strings.

A prerequisite for using the wrappers is an understanding of the usage of the associated C routines, in particular the data structures they are based on. The principle difficulty in creating the wrappers was the need to manage these C structs from within Fortran, particularly as they contain pointers to allocated memory, pointers to C functions, and other structs that themselves contain similar entities.

To this end, routines have been provided to set and retrieve values of the various structs, for example WCSPUT and WCSGET for the wcsprm struct, and CELPUT and CELGET for the celprm struct. These must be used in conjunction with wrappers on the routines provided to manage the structs in C, for example WCSINIT, WCSSUB, WCSCOPY, WCSFREE, and WCSPRT which wrap wcsinit(), wcssub(), wcscopy(), wcsfree(), and wcsprt().

Compilers (e.g. gfortran) may warn of inconsistent usage of the third argument in the various *PUT and *GET routines, and as of gfortran 10, these warnings have been promoted to errors. Thus, type-specific variants are provided for each of the *PUT routines, *PTI, *PTD, and *PTC for int, double, or char[], and likewise *GTI, *GTD, and *GTC for the *GET routines. While, for brevity, we will here continue to refer to the *PUT and *GET routines, as compilers are generally becoming stricter, use of the type-specific variants is recommended.

The various *PUT and *GET routines are based on codes defined in Fortran include files (*.inc). If your Fortran compiler does not support the INCLUDE statement then you will need to include these manually in your code as necessary. Codes are defined as parameters with names like WCS_CRPIX which refers to wcsprm::crpix (if your Fortran compiler does not support long symbolic names then you will need to rename these).

The include files also contain parameters, such as WCSLEN, that define the length of an INTEGER array that must be declared to hold the struct. This length may differ for different platforms depending on how the C compiler aligns data within the structs. A test program for the C library, twcs, prints the size of the struct in sizeof(int) units and the values in the Fortran include files must equal or exceed these. On some platforms, such as Suns, it is important that the start of the INTEGER array be aligned on a DOUBLE PRECISION boundary, otherwise a mysterious BUS error may result. This may be achieved via an EQUIVALENCE with a DOUBLE PRECISION variable, or by sequencing variables in a COMMON block so that the INTEGER array follows immediately after a DOUBLE PRECISION variable.

The *PUT routines set only one element of an array at a time; the final one or two integer arguments of these routines specify 1-relative array indices (N.B. not 0-relative as in C). The one exception is the prjprm::pv array.

The *PUT routines also reset the flag element to signal that the struct needs to be reinitialized. Therefore, if you wanted to set wcsprm::flag itself to -1 prior to the first call to WCSINIT, for example, then that WCSPUT must be the last one before the call.

The *GET routines retrieve whole arrays at a time and expect array arguments of the appropriate length where necessary. Note that they do not initialize the structs, i.e. via wcsset(), prjset(), or whatever.

A basic coding fragment is

      INTEGER   LNGIDX, STATUS
      CHARACTER CTYPE1*72

      INCLUDE 'wcs.inc'

*     WCSLEN is defined as a parameter in wcs.inc.
      INTEGER   WCS(WCSLEN)
      DOUBLE PRECISION DUMMY
      EQUIVALENCE (WCS, DUMMY)

*     Allocate memory and set default values for 2 axes.
      STATUS = WCSPTI (WCS, WCS_FLAG, -1, 0, 0)
      STATUS = WCSINI (2, WCS)

*     Set CRPIX1, and CRPIX2; WCS_CRPIX is defined in wcs.inc.
      STATUS = WCSPTD (WCS, WCS_CRPIX, 512D0, 1, 0)
      STATUS = WCSPTD (WCS, WCS_CRPIX, 512D0, 2, 0)

*     Set PC1_2 to 5.0 (I = 1, J = 2).
      STATUS = WCSPTD (WCS, WCS_PC, 5D0, 1, 2)

*     Set CTYPE1 to 'RA---SIN'; N.B. must be given as CHARACTER*72.
      CTYPE1 = 'RA---SIN'
      STATUS = WCSPTC (WCS, WCS_CTYPE, CTYPE1, 1, 0)

*     Use an alternate method to set CTYPE2.
      STATUS = WCSPTC (WCS, WCS_CTYPE, 'DEC--SIN'//CHAR(0), 2, 0)

*     Set PV1_3 to -1.0 (I = 1, M = 3).
      STATUS = WCSPTD (WCS, WCS_PV, -1D0, 1, 3)

      etc.

*     Initialize.
      STATUS = WCSSET (WCS)
      IF (STATUS.NE.0) THEN
        CALL FLUSH (6)
        STATUS = WCSPERR (WCS, 'EXAMPLE: '//CHAR(0))
      ENDIF

*     Find the "longitude" axis.
      STATUS = WCSGTI (WCS, WCS_LNG, LNGIDX)

*     Free memory.
      STATUS = WCSFREE (WCS)

Refer to the various Fortran test programs for further programming examples. In particular, twcs and twcsmix show how to retrieve elements of the celprm and prjprm structs contained within the wcsprm struct.

Treatment of CHARACTER arguments in wrappers such as SPCTYPE, SPECX, and WCSSPTR, depends on whether they are given or returned. Where a CHARACTER variable is returned, its length must match the declared length in the definition of the C wrapper. The terminating null character in the C string, and all following it up to the declared length, are replaced with blanks. If the Fortran CHARACTER variable were shorter than the declared length, an out-of-bounds memory access error would result. If longer, the excess, uninitialized, characters could contain garbage.

If the CHARACTER argument is given, a null-terminated CHARACTER variable may be provided as input, e.g. constructed using the Fortran CHAR(0) intrinsic as in the example code above. The wrapper makes a character-by-character copy, searching for a NULL character in the process. If it finds one, the copy terminates early, resulting in a valid C string. In this case any trailing blanks before the NULL character are preserved if it makes sense to do so, such as in setting a prefix for use by the *PERR wrappers, such as WCSPERR in the example above. If a NULL is not found, then the CHARACTER argument must be at least as long as the declared length, and any trailing blanks are stripped off. Should a CHARACTER argument exceed the declared length, the excess characters are ignored.

There is one exception to the above caution regarding CHARACTER arguments. The WCSLIB_VERSION wrapper is unusual in that it provides for the length of its CHARACTER argument to be specified, and only so many characters as fit within that length are returned.

Note that the data type of the third argument to the *PUT (or *PTI, *PTD, or *PTC) and *GET (or *GTI, *GTD, or *GTC) routines differs depending on the data type of the corresponding C struct member, be it int, double, or char[]. It is essential that the Fortran data type match that of the C struct for int and double types, and be a CHARACTER variable of the correct length for char[] types, or else be null-terminated, as in the coding example above. As a further example, in the two equivalent calls

      STATUS = PRJGET (PRJ, PRJ_NAME, NAME)
      STATUS = PRJGTC (PRJ, PRJ_NAME, NAME)

which return a character string, NAME must be a CHARACTER variable of length 40, as declared in the prjprm struct, no less and no more, the comments above pertaining to wrappers that contain CHARACTER arguments also applying here. However, a few exceptions have been made to simplify coding. The relevant *PUT (or *PTC) wrappers allow unterminated CHARACTER variables of less than the declared length for the following: prjprm::code (3 characters), spcprm::type (4 characters), spcprm::code (3 characters), and fitskeyid::name (8 characters). It doesn't hurt to specify longer CHARACTER variables, but the trailing characters will be ignored. Notwithstanding this simplification, the length of the corresponding variables in the *GET (or *GTC) wrappers must match the length declared in the struct.

When calling wrappers for C functions that print to stdout, such as WCSPRT, and WCSPERR, or that may print to stderr, such as WCSPIH, WCSBTH, WCSULEXE, or WCSUTRNE, it may be necessary to flush the Fortran I/O buffers beforehand so that the output appears in the correct order. The wrappers for these functions do call fflush(NULL), but depending on the particular system, this may not succeed in flushing the Fortran I/O buffers. Most Fortran compilers provide the non-standard intrinsic FLUSH(), which is called with unit number 6 to flush stdout (as in the example above), and unit 0 for stderr.

A basic assumption made by the wrappers is that an INTEGER variable is no less than half the size of a DOUBLE PRECISION.