Inter-operability with KAPPA

Catalogues written in the KAPPA variant STL format permit a limited degree of inter-operability between CURSA and KAPPA. Currently the KAPPA applications which access tables read them as ASCII text files. Typically these files can contain header comments beginning with a `#' character. This format is consistent with the KAPPA variant STL, but KAPPA does not `know' that it is reading STL format files.

A table written by a KAPPA application typically consists of just the table of values, with one row per line and the fields separated by one or more spaces. Before such a table can be accessed with CURSA you must create a description for it. Either the description can be edited into the start of the file (the example in file /star/share/cursa/kappa.TXT was created in this way) or the description can be in a separate file, as described in Appendices  and .

If an STL catalogue is to be written by CURSA and subsequently accessed with KAPPA then it must be written in the STL variant format. Also, it must not contain any null values because the KAPPA applications are not able to interpret them.

It is possible that future versions of KAPPA may use the full STL format in which case a greater degree of inter-operability will be possible.