On Wed, 22 Oct 2003, Stephen Walton wrote:

Mark's announcement of WCSLIB 3.3 reminds me to ask a generic question
about an issue I'm sure others have faced: how best to switch from an
IRAF environment to a CFITSIO/WCSLIB one. While IRAF has served us well
for 15 years, I don't see a huge effort being undertaken to bring its
WCS library in compliance with the standard, nor to support other map
projections beyond those already in place. As a solar astronomer I have
other needs :-) .

Most of my code is in Fortran, with just a few SPP "wrapper" main
programs to get access to some of the IRAF IMIO routines.

You may be interested in the AST library which provides a high level
interface for reading, writing, modifying and plotting generalised WCS
information (including FITS-WCS of various flavours). It is callable
from Fortran, C and (via JNI) from Java. See:

http://www.starlink.ac.uk/ast/

David