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Requirements

The tasking environment of AIPS++ is used to construct the overall runtime system that astronomers see. It is also must provide various language-independent high-level services which are used both by applications programmers and astronomers who wish to perform some ad-hoc calculations on their data.

These requirements have been culled from the original AIPS++ specification, and from our experience building various prototype applications. In abbreviated form, these requirements are:

User Interface

Both a GUI interface and a powerful command line interpreter(CLI) should be provided. It should be possible to replace the user interface.

User-callable toolkit

A set of useful tools (computation, plotting, ...should be available to users (both from the CLI and from other languages -- FORTRAN, C, C++).

Access to data

The user should be able to directly manipulate AIPS++ data structures, e.g., through the CLI. The user should be able to manage data through normal operating-system utilities.

Tasks

-- convenient encapsulations of algorithms -- should be available. It should be possible to execute tasks directly from the operating system.

• Task parameters should have context-dependent default values.
• Parameters should be local by default, although it should be possible to copy parameters from one task to another.
• The user must be able to save, copy, and edit parameters.
• It should be possible to change some parameters for some running tasks.
• A mechanism to support advising the user of unusual parameters should be provided.
• An ``executable'' processing log should be maintained for all running tasks.

Help

Context-sensitive help should be available online at all levels of the system.

Packages

The user should be able to customize what packages are to be used.

Nearly real-time

The system should be usable in a nearly real-time environment, i.e. at the telescope.

Network capable

The system should be capable of distributing computation, displays, etc., over the network.

Data ``catalogs''

Flexible mechanisms to organize data under the control of the user must be provided.