The HDF-EOS 2 and HDF-EOS 5 Compatibility Library contains C-language functions that provide uniform access to HDF-EOS 2 and HDF-EOS 5 files through one set of application programming interface (API) calls. (“HDF-EOS 2” and “HDF-EOS 5” are defined in the immediately preceding article.) Without this library, differences between the APIs of HDF-EOS 2 and HDF-EOS 5 would necessitate writing of different programs to cover HDF-EOS 2 and HDF-EOS 5. The API associated with this library is denoted “he25.”

For nearly every HDF-EOS 5 API call, there is a corresponding he25 API call. If a file in question is in the HDF-EOS 5 format, the code reverts to the corresponding HDF-EOS 5 call; if the file is in the HDF-EOS 2 format, the code translates the arguments to HDF-EOS 2 equivalents (if necessary), calls the HDF-EOS 2 call, and retranslates the results back to HDF-EOS 5 (if necessary).

This program was written by Richard Ullman of Goddard Space Flight Center; Bob Bane of Global Science & Technology, Inc.; and Jingli Yang of Earth Resources Technology, Inc.

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