Section 5.3.9. Concluding remarks

CIF is a domain-specific format that cannot attract the number of programmers that generic formats such as XML do. In spite of this, there is an impressive collection of programs available to support activities at many levels, from the single-line shell script needed to search for some desired content in a collection of CIFs, to the industrial-scale activities of major databases and publishing houses. As many examples as possible of the programs discussed in this chapter have been collected on the CD-ROM accompanying this volume and on the IUCr web site (http://www.iucr.org/iucr-top/cif/software ). It is hoped that the contributions described here will inspire future generations of programmers to contribute to a growing and increasingly robust software collection to make the use of CIFs ever easier and more fruitful.