[Fsatom] Re: CML and macromolecules

[Peter Murray-Rust]

At 09:29 26/10/2003 -0800, Erik Lindahl wrote:

>OpenBabel is a great idea, but I think the C++ really hurts adoption :-)
>
>It works great to link C/C++ on a standard PC, but on many platforms the 
>C++ compilers are either bad or nonexistent (embedded CPUs, for instance). 
>This means we can't *rely* on babel for our IO routines, although it might 
>be nice to have as an optional plugin.

Babel has a useful commandline interface so it can be used a bit like a 
Unix pipe (though it needs explicit filenames). This is the way that we use 
it (e.g. wrapped in an ant script). Of course it still has the portability 
concern but at least you can use standard *.exe distribs.

Peter