CHEF: A Status report

CHEF refers both to a framework and to an interactive application emphasizing accelerator optics calculations. The framework supports multiple domains of applications: e.g. nonlinear analysis, perturbation theory, and tracking. Its underlying philosophy is to provide an infrastructure with minimum hidden implicit assumptions, general enough to facilitate both routine and specialized computational tasks, and to minimize the duplication of necessary, complex bookkeeping tasks. CHEF was already described in recent conferences [1, 2]. This paper is a status report on recent developments, including issues related to applications to high energy linacs.