What is the connection between netCDF and CDF?
CDF was developed at the NASA Space Science Data Center at Goddard, and is freely available. It was originally a VMS FORTRAN interface for scientific data access. Unidata reimplemented the library from scratch to use XDR for a machine-independent representation, designed the CDL (network Common Data form Language) text representation for netCDF data, and added aggregate data access, a single-file implementation, named dimensions, and variable-specific attributes. NetCDF and CDF have evolved independently. CDF now supports many of the same features as netCDF (aggregate data access, XDR representation, single-file representation, variable-specific attributes), but some differences remain (netCDF doesn’t support native-mode representation, CDF doesn’t support named dimensions). There is no compatibility between data in CDF and netCDF form, and as yet no translation software exists to convert data in one form to data in the other form. For a more detailed description of differences between
