Ascii mapping to BinDS

The Asterix file format used by IMPORT and EXPORT is a useful way of getting all the important attributes of a HDS binned dataset into ascii, where it can be e-mailed, edited or otherwise manipulated. By simply moving the code for IMPORT and EXPORT into ADI, actor objects will give direct access to ascii files by applications using ADI without the requirement to perform the format conversion (although it would be recommended for large datasets). Because the ascii file used is read and written sequentially it would be quite possible for Asterix applications to use UNIX pipes to pass data around. The syntax adopted for this would follow UNIX idiom, ie. the hyphen means use standard input for read operations and standard output for write operations. An example where you want to find the histogram of a dataset and display it to a device without keeping the intermediate file would be,

   % frequency my_cube - reg spacing=2 | gdraw - xwindows