Many users need to transport unformatted floating point (4 bytes per sample) data files written by a VAX to a machine running UNIX. This computer may have a different convention for interpreting unformatted floating point data values. VAXFC converts these non-ASCII files to the unformatted floating point representation of the UNIX machine. This is done by reading the bytes bit by bit, converting them to floating point numbers, then writing the results to another file.
VAXFC is useful when data files created by a VAX must be used on other machines. For instance, NASA/JPL AIRSAR synthetic aperture radar synoptic data is processed on a VAX computer, but many times users wish to analyze the data on a DEC Alpha, SUN, HP, SGI, etc. This requires that the data be converted to the floating point format of several different types of computers. This software was written with generality in mind. The data file is allowed to have any length header (header values are not converted, so if it is an ASCII header it will be preserved), and any length header bytes at the beginning of each line (must be a constant length for each line).
VAXFC was originally written to convert AIRSAR synoptic data from VAX floating point format to UNIX floating point format. These files have three lines of ASCII header information (15360 bytes), followed by 5088 lines of data, each data line being 5120 bytes (1280 floating point numbers), with no prefix header at the beginning of each line. Therefore, these values are the default values. However, any unformatted floating point data file may be converted by this software.
VAXFC carries the NASA case number NPO-19464. It was originally released as part of the Cosmic collection.
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