A Interval is a Region which represents upper and/or lower limits on one or more axes of a Frame. For a point to be within the region represented by the Interval, the point must satisfy all the restrictions placed on all the axes. The point is outside the region if it fails to satisfy any one of the restrictions. Each axis may have either an upper limit, a lower limit, both or neither. If both limits are supplied but are in reverse order (so that the lower limit is greater than the upper limit), then the interval is an excluded interval, rather than an included interval.
At least one axis limit must be supplied.
Note, The Interval class makes no allowances for cyclic nature of some coordinate systems (such as SkyFrame coordinates). A Box should usually be used in these cases since this requires the user to think about suitable upper and lower limits,
If supplied, the uncertainty Region must be of a class for which all instances are centro-symetric (e.g. Box, Circle, Ellipse, etc.) or be a Prism containing centro-symetric component Regions. A deep copy of the supplied Region will be taken, so subsequent changes to the uncertainty Region using the supplied pointer will have no effect on the created Box. Alternatively, a null Object pointer (AST__NULL) may be supplied, in which case a default uncertainty is used equivalent to a box 1.0E-6 of the size of the Box being created.
The uncertainty Region has two uses: 1) when the AST_OVERLAP function compares two Regions for equality the uncertainty Region is used to determine the tolerance on the comparison, and 2) when a Region is mapped into a different coordinate system and subsequently simplified (using AST_SIMPLIFY), the uncertainties are used to determine if the transformed boundary can be accurately represented by a specific shape of Region.
AST A Library for Handling World Coordinate Systems in Astronomy