an error I would prefer to just print that and exit(1).

which might work better for thermal lens part.

in older revisions of scipy.

added proper formatting to the gauss parameters i.e.
{.15g}, probably need to do that for many other params as well.

code lines that were not parsed into an object but have been
added as extra lines. This works for me, but we could do
something more sophisticated if needed.

Next steps are the computing of ASC signals for increasing maxtems

Also pdtype was read in by the photdiode code (as a pdxxx)