I recently encountered the surprisingly difficult task of processing a PDB file
in Python.
While reading fixed-width files is relatively trivial in certain old-fashioned
languages with support for complex format statements,
like my beloved Fortran,
Python makes it
less simple.
Given the myriad record types
that frequently appear in such files,
doing this processing on an ad-hoc basis seems like a terrible idea.
Thankfully,
the fields in these records lend themselves nicely to implementation as objects,
so I went ahead and did just that.
