14 LUX’s History

LUX is a fork of ANA. ANA was originally designed to process data from the Solar Maximum Mission (SMM) satellite, which flew in the early 1980s. It was implemented for the VAX VMS operating system in assembly code and a little bit of Fortran mostly by Richard Shine (of the then Lockheed Palo Alto Research Laboratory, nowadays known as the Lockheed Martin Solar & Astrophysics Laboratory) in Palo Alto, California.

Around 1990, Richard Shine converted the assembly code to C code and ported ANA to SGI’s Irix operating system. At that time, Louis Strous at Utrecht University in the Netherlands took the Irix copy and ported it to Dec Ultrix. Shine and Strous have mostly independently improved ANA since then, leading to divergent versions of ANA with a common subset of capabilities.

In 1994, Strous rewrote ANA’s parser and compiler, replacing the old parser with a new one, using GNU’s bison parser generator. The new parser and compiler allowed simple addition of new features to the language, such as keywords arguments and subscripting of expressions.

Between 1994 and 1999, the Shine and Strous versions of ANA drifted apart somewhat. In early 1999, Strous produced a version (ANA 3) that is supposedly backwardly compatible with both the older Shine and Strous versions. Since that time, the two versions have diverged again.

In 2013, Strous renamed his version of ANA to LUX to avoid confusion.