ESO library for automated astronomical data-reduction

 The Common Pipeline Library (CPL) comprises a set of ISO-C libraries that
 provide a comprehensive, efficient and robust software toolkit. It forms a
 basis for the creation of automated astronomical data-reduction tasks (known
 as "pipelines").
 .
 The CPL was developed to standardise the way instrument pipelines
 are built, to shorten their development cycle and to ease their
 maintenance. However, it may be more generally applied to any similar
 application, and the details of the CPL code have been engineered in
 a way to make the library portable and flexible, as well as
 minimising external dependencies.
 .
 The CPL provides a host of functionality, presented in a clear,
 generic and uniform manner. Among its many features, the CPL offers:
 .
  * many useful low-level data types (images, tables, matrices, strings,
    property lists, ...),
  * many fundamental statistic, arithmetic and conversion operations for
    these data types.
  * medium-level data access methods (e.g. a data abstraction layer for
    FITS files),
  * data table organisation and manipulation,
  * keyword/value handling and management,
  * a standardised application interface for pipeline recipes, and,
  * support for dynamic loading of recipe modules.
 .
 Despite the current bias towards instrument pipeline development, the
 library also provides a variety of general-purpose image- and
 signal-processing functions, making it an excellent framework for the
 creation of more generic data-handling packages.
 .
 This package contains the static library and the C header files.