Specifying Component Names

Many NDF_ routines are capable of operating on more than one NDF component and use a character string holding one of the component names given in § to identify the component to be used. If required, these names may be abbreviated (to no less than 3 characters) and may be written using both upper- and lower-case characters. Thus:

`DATA', `Data', `Variance', `Var', `UNIT' and `hist'

could all be passed to NDF_ routines as valid component names. To avoid confusion between component names and other character strings which may occasionally have the same value, all component names in programming examples in this document are given with a capitalised first letter followed by lower-case, e.g. `Quality'.

Some NDF_ routines will also accept a list of components, in which the component names should be separated by commas, for instance:

`Data,Variance,Title'

Spaces may be included before and after component names, but may not be embedded within them.