Starlink-pyast

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- The FitsChan class now has an option to support reading and writing
of FITS-WCS headers that use the -TAB algorithm described in FITS-WCS paper
III. This option is controlled by a new FitsChan attribute called TabOK.
See the documentation for TabOK for more information.

- A new class called "Table" has been added. A Table is a KeyMap in
which each entry represents a cell in a two-dimensional table.

- A new class called "FitsTable" has been added. A FitsTable is a
Table that has an associated FitsChan holding headers appropriate to a
FITS binary table.

- KeyMaps can now hold byte (i.e. "unsigned char" or BYTE) values.

- A new method called astMapRename (AST_MAPRENAME) has been added to rename
an existing entry in a KeyMap.

- KeyMaps have a new attribute called KeyCase that can be set to zero to
make the handling of keys case insensitive.

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- A bug has been fixed in the FitsChan class that could cause wavelength
axes to be assigned the units "m/s" when reading WCS information from a
FITS header.

- The astSet function (AST_SET) now allows literal commas to be included in
string attribute values. String attribute values that include a literal
comma should be enclosed in quotation marks.

- A bug in FitsChan has been fixed that caused "-SIN" projection codes within
FITS-WCS headers to be mis-interpreted, resulting in no FrameSet being
read by astRead.

- The KeyMap class has a new attribute called "SortBy". It controls
the order in which keys are returned by the astMapKey (AST_MAPKEY) function.
Keys can be sorted alphabetically or by age, or left unsorted.

- Access to KeyMaps holding thousands of entries is now significantly
faster.

- KeyMaps can now hold word (i.e. "short int" or INTEGER*2) values.

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- The KeyMap class has a new method called astMapCopy/AST_MAPCOPY that
copies entries from one KeyMap to another KeyMap.

- The KeyMap class now supports entries that have undefined values. A
new method called astMapPutU/AST_MAPPUTU will store an entry with undefined
value in a keymap.

- The KeyMap class has a new boolean attribute called MapLocked. If true
(non-zero), an error is reported if an attempt is made to add any new entries
to a KeyMap (the value associated with any old entry may still be changed
without error). The default is false (zero).

- The Object class has a new method called astHasAttribute/AST_HASATTRIBUTE
that returns a boolean value indicating if a specified Object has a named
attribute.

- The SkyFrame class has two new read-only boolean attributes called
IsLatAxis and IsLonAxis that can be used to determine the nature of a
specified SkyFrame axis.

- A bug has been fixed in the astRebin(Seq)/AST_REBIN(SEQ) methods
that could cause flux to be lost from the edges of the supplied array.

- A bug has been fixed in the astRebin(Seq)/AST_REBIN(SEQ) methods
that caused the first user supplied parameter to be interpreted as the
full width of the spreading kernel, rather than the half-width.

- The StcsChan class now ignores case when reading STC-S phrases (except
that units strings are still case sensitive).

- The Channel class now has an Indent attribute that controls indentation
in the text created by astWrite/AST_WRITE. The StcsIndent and XmlIndent
attributes have been removed.

- All classes of Channel now use the string "<bad>" to represent the
floating point value AST__BAD, rather than the literal formatted value
(typically "-1.79769313486232e+308" ).

- The KeyMap class now uses the string "<bad>" to represent the
floating point value AST__BAD, rather than the literal formatted value
(typically "-1.79769313486232e+308" ).

- The KeyMap class has a new method called astMapPutElem<X>/AST_MAPPUTELEM<X>
that allows a value to be put into a single element of a vector entry in
a KeyMap. The vector entry is extended automatically to hold the new
element if required.

- The DSBSpecFrame class now reports an error if the local oscillator
frequency is less than the absoliute value of the intermediate frequency.

- A new method astQuadApprox produces a quadratic fit to a 2D Mapping.

- A new method astSkyOffsetMap produces a Mapping from absolute SkyFrame
coordinates to offset SkyFrame coordinates.

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- The details of how a Frame is aligned with another Frame by the
astFindFrame and astConvert (AST_FINDFRAME and AST_CONVERT) functions
have been changed. The changes mean that a Frame can now be aligned with
an instance of a sub-class of Frame, so long as the number of axes and
the Domain values are consistent. For instance, a basic 2-dimensional
Frame with Domain "SKY" will now align succesfully with a SkyFrame,
conversion between the two Frames being achieved using a UnitMap.

- The arrays that supply input values to astMapPut1<X> are now declared
"const".

- Added method astMatchAxes (AST_MATCHAXES) to the Frame class. This
allows corresponding axes in two Frames to be identified.

- The astAddFrame (AST_ADDFRAME) method can now be used to append one or
more axes to all Frames in a FrameSet.

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- The astUnlock function now has an extra parameter that controls whether
or not an error is reported if the Object is currently locked by another
thread.

- The values of the AST__THREADSAFE macro (defined in ast.h) have
been changed from "yes" and "no" to "1" and "0".

- The PointList class has a new method, astPoints, that copies the axis
values from the PointList into a supplied array.

- The PointList class has a new (read-only) attribute, ListSize, that
gives the number of points stored in the PointList.

- A new method (astIntersect) has been added to the Frame class. It
determines the position at which two geodesic curves intersect.

- The XmlStrict attribute and astXmlWarnings function have been removed.
The same functionality is now available via the existing Strict attribute,
a new attribute called ReportLevel, and a new function called astWarnings.

- A bug in the type-checking of Objects passed as arguments to constructor
functions has been fixed. This bug could lead to applications crashing or
showing strange behaviour if an inappropriate class of Object was
supplied as an argument to a constructor.

- The astPickAxes function will now return a Region, if possible, when
applied to a Region. If this is not possible, a Frame will be returned as
before.

- The default gap size between the ISO date/time labels used by the Plot
class when displaying an annotated axis described by a TimeFrame has been
changed. The changes are meant to improve the labelling of calendar time
axes that span intervals from a day to a few years.

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- AST is now thread-safe. Many of the macro definitions in the "ast.h"
header file have changed, and so all source code that include "ast.h"
should be re-compiled.

- The TimeFrame class now support Local Time as a time scale. The offset
from UTC to Local Time is specified by a new TimeFrame attribute called
LTOffset.

- Addition of a new class called Plot3D that provides facilities for
producing 3-dimensional annotated coordinate grids.

- A correction for diurnal aberration is now included when
converting between AZEL and other celestial coordinate systems. The
correction is based on the value of the ObsLat Frame attribute (the
geodetic latitude of the observer).

- A bug has been fixed which caused the DUT1 attribute to be ignored
by the SkyFrame class when finding conversions between AZEL and other
celestial coordinate systems.

- The Channel class has a new attribute called Strict which controls
whether or not to report an error if unexpected data items are found
within an AST Object description read from an external data source. Note,
the default behaviour is now not to report such errors. This differs from
previous versions of AST which always reported an error is unexpected
input items were encountered.