On Fri, Jun 7, 2013 at 8:37 AM, Pete Meyer <[email protected]> wrote: > On the other hand, programming an implementation of something is a good > way to make sure that you really understand it - even if you end up using > another program.
I would argue that it's not really necessary to understand the column formatting of a PDB file, any more than it's necessary to understand how binary data is arranged in an MTZ file. (Especially since the long-term plan is to migrate to mmCIF, which is more flexible and can store far more information.) We're ultimately trying to answer questions of biology and chemistry, not informatics, and writing a parser that actually handles all of the variety in the PDB (let alone the garbage produced by some programs) is far more difficult than it sounds. -Nat
