This file is part of the "GNU polyxmass" project.

The "GNU polyxmass" project is an official GNU project package (see
www.gnu.org) released ---in its entirety--- under the GNU General
Public License and was started at the Centre National de la Recherche
Scientifique (FRANCE), that granted me the formal authorization to
publish it under this Free Software License.

Copyright (C) 2000,2001,2002,2003 Filippo Rusconi

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    This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
    it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published
    by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License,
    or (at your option) any later version.

    This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
    but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
    MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU
    General Public License for more details.

    You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
    along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
    Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307
    USA

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README:

GNU libpxmchem is a library that implements a rather big number of
chemistry-related functions that are heavily used by the other modules
of the GNU polyxmass software project.

Examples of such chemistry-related functions are:

- the implementation of the PxmMonomer object which models the
  chemical object "monomer" with which polymers are made;

- the implementation of the PxmModif object which models the chemical
  modification of a monomer or polymer;

- the implementation of the PxmCleavespec object which models the
  chemical cleavage in a polymer sequence, based upon a specificity
  pattern and other parameters.

- the functions that are involved in mass computations, elemental or
  monomer composition computations, polymer cleavage logic, polymer
  gas-phase fragmentation logic are all implemented in this library.

This all sums up to this: GNU libpxmchem is the chemical intelligence
library of the whole GNU polyxmass mass spectrometric framework. This
library is heavily used by the graphical user interface modules of the
GNU polyxmass software project:

- GNU polyxdef (definition of polymer chemistries)

- GNU polyxcalc (simple polymer definition-aware mass calculator)

- GNU polyxedit (the big module where mass spectrometry experiments
  take place with polymer sequence editing, cleavage, fragmentation,
  modification...)

