Reply to the Comments of Gillespie and Popelier

摘要

I want to reply to the two instances where my comments are said to be "unjustified and unfair". This is the case at the end of the paragraph on page 3333, column 2. The authors state that I cited unpublished calculations in my review. This is not true! The calculations I am referring to concern the energies which are necessary to distort BF_3 and BCl_3 from the planar equilibrium geometry to the pyramidal structure in the complexes F_3B-NH_3 and Cl_3B-NH_3. Unlike in the 1990 paper by Gillespie and coworkers (Inorg. Chem. 1999, 38, 4659) who used model structures, the calculations of the real molecules show that the distortion energy for BF_3 is smaller than for BCl_3. This was already published by Politzer and coworkers in 1993 (Inorg. Chem. 1993, 32, 2622). The latter work was cited in the 1999 paper by Gillespie and co-workers, but apparently this part of the paper has escaped their attention.