Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!bionet!THEORY.BCHS.UH.EDU!dbd
From: dbd@THEORY.BCHS.UH.EDU (Dan Davison)
Newsgroups: bionet.molbio.genbank
Subject: More I must have been out of the room
Message-ID: <9008031627.AA04497@theory.BCHS.UH.EDU>
Date: 3 Aug 90 16:27:49 GMT
Sender: daemon@genbank.BIO.NET
Lines: 38

As I've gotten a couple note indicating confusion about exactly I was
referring to:

1) The new feature table is an *excellent* idea.  It is essential if
   important biological information is going to be electronically
   accessible, i.e. usable. It also represents a lot of hard work
   by a lot of good people, and I did not intend to denigrate that
   work or them.

2) Yes, there were announcements about the new feature table and about
   when it would start appearing.  For some very obscure reason I thought
   the new feature table was going to be INTERNAL to the existing
   entries, as in an extended "COMMENTS" field or something similar.

3) Lastly, the entire episode is another example of some individuals
   missing the distinction between being a professional or near-professional
   programmer (or having one on staff) and *the vast majority of
   the biological community*. I'm sure the commerical vendors of sw
   love the change since they now can sell new sw (possibly at "upgrade",
   instead of "full" cost).  But NIH has been wreaking havoc with  
   cutting and not renewing grants that would otherwise have been
   funded.  This means that some folks are not going to be able to
   hire programmers to fix their software.  Therefore, a lot of
   us will be using GB63 for sw that reads the feature table and
   ignoring or editing GB Rel. 64 and later.

So, I offer a challenge:  would someone contribute to the public
domain a set of routines that parse the new feature table format?
(No, it doesn't have to be distributed from the UH server).  C,
Fortran, pascal and BASIC seem to be the languges most often used.

Summary: no insult intended to the creaters of the feature table;
I publically apologize if I have accidentially hurt someone.
The release of the new format on the ordinary biologist was just not
thought through properly.


dan davison