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> ... anyhow all calculations during refinement are in fractional
coordinates ...

Not necessarily: I can only speak for the RESTRAIN program for restrained
refinement that I was involved in developing (the first use of TLS in
macromolecular refinement), and at no point were co-ordinates converted to
fractional or fractional co-ordinates ever used.  All structure factor
calculations (and of course the geometric restraints) were done with the
original orthogonal co-ordinates read from the PDB file, using the
classical structure factor equations (of course more modern programs use
FFT for this).

Essentially, you can express the phase factor as exp(2 pi i h.(Sr + t)) =
exp(2 pi i (H.R + h.t)) where h is the index vector in integers as read
from the MTZ file, r is the fractional co-ordinate vector (not needed in
the calculation), S and t represent the real-space symmetry operator, H is
the orthogonalised rotated reciprocal lattice vector (H~ = h~SB^-1), and R
is the orthogonal co-ordinate vector (R = Br).  I think this is the most
efficient way of organising the calculation provided the outer loops are
over symmetry operators and reflections (so H is calculated once) and the
inner loop is over co-ordinates.  Of course I accept that using FFT via the
electron density is a much more efficient way but I think even then no
conversion to fractional is necessary.

Cheers

-- Ian