I have inspected the PDF description of the HIERARCH Convention in the
registry and I have the following questions/comments.

0) Who is the author (or authority) which issued such document ?

1) I was of course aware of the usage of the HIERARCH convention at ESO
and I think section 1 of the document provides an adequate
documentation of the generalized hierarchical convention while
leaving ESO specific details to the (quoted) DICB

2) The key characteristics of the general convention described in
section 1 is that the first token defines a namespace.

So any further details for namespace ESO are correctly referred
to ESO documentation.

Did anybody else use their own namespaces ?

And who is the authority to prevent conflicts in the creation
of namespaces ?


3) Although defined in a self-consisent manner, the content of
section 2 is DEFINING AN ALTOGETHER DIFFERENT CONVENTION !

In section 2 there is no namespace, or any token is a
namespace of its own.

This seems to me a rather bad and confusing idea. It has nothing
to with an "hierarchical" organization

Unless such usage is already in widespread diffusion, I think
we should try to stop it, and replace it with some cleaner
alternative

- define a specific namespace for long keywords e.g. one of

HIERARCH LONGKWDS anysinglelongtoken = value / comment
HIERARCH LONG anysinglelongtoken = value / comment

(although this is a misuse of the name and a little space waste)

- define an altogether new convention (with the same syntax of
HIERARCH but eventually specifying there is a single token,
and with the keyword name itself replaced by something else)

LONGKWDS anysinglelongtoken = value / comment

i.e. the 8-char kwd name is LONGKWDS, char 9 is blank so it is
formally a commentary type keyword, and for the rest as for
HIERARCH but ntoken=1

My idea is that we should register section 1 only as description of
HIERARCH and perhaps register a separate LONGKWDS convention somehow
replacing section 2.


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