Why was ATOMS written?
Originally ATOMS was a Fortran program written to aid in the task of writing input files for Feff, a program for ab initio x-ray absorption theory. As ATOMS grew and was used for more purposes, the limitations of the original Fortran implementation became annoying to the author. Consequently, ATOMS was rewritten from scratch in Perl using object oriented methods. This resulted in a code base that is easier to maintain and extend and allowed many new features to be added to ATOMS.
