* The ternary above already ensures that datatype only takes values
  from the interval [1,32].

* It is possible to build netcdf 4.x without HDF5 but with MPI
  parallelization support.

* Using long yields larger range of consistent comparisons.

* There is no need for moving data to memory to remove fraction bits.

* Use failsafe malloc wrappers when not.

* Also use failsafe wrappers for malloc.

* These are mostly due to conditional compilation.

* C automatically expands such expressions to int.