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[fitsbits] Start of the CONTINUE keyword Public Comment Period
I'd like to make a couple of points about the CONTINUE convention.
First, I recommend that wording be added to disallow the usage of the convention for any keyword relating to the physical organization of data within a FITS file. For example, one should not be able to continue keywords such as "TDIMnnn" or "EXTNAME". Second, I'd like to make some comments about keyword ordering. In solar physics it's common to convert FITS headers into structures upon reading. For example, the simple FITS header SIMPLE = T /Written by IDL: Fri Jul 13 15:52:15 2007 BITPIX = -32 /Real*4 (floating point) NAXIS = 2 / NAXIS1 = 100 / NAXIS2 = 100 / END would be converted into a structure with tag elements SIMPLE INT 1 BITPIX LONG -32 NAXIS LONG 2 NAXIS1 LONG 100 NAXIS2 LONG 100 In many cases, the arrangement of the structure is predetermined, and the FITS header is mined to extract the keywords corresponding to the desired parameters. In such cases, the original order of the keywords within the header is lost. I would envision that continuation lines would best be handled by the FITS reader, so that the resulting structure tag value would be the complete string. In that case, the question of the original ordering of the keyword would be moot. However, I doubt that any software would actually be changed to implement this until there was a real need for it. Bill Thompson |
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