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[fitsbits] Start of the CONTINUE keyword Public Comment Period



 
 
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Old July 12th 07, 09:10 PM posted to sci.astro.fits
William Pence
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Default [fitsbits] Start of the CONTINUE keyword Public Comment Period

Walter Jaffe wrote:
While I think this is a useful convention, I note that this introduces
an implicit ordering of FITS headers, i.e. they have to be read
in a certain order if you want to interpret them correctly. As
far as I know, this is the first time such an implicit ordering
has been introduced and it could conceivable cause some problems
in copying/concatenating headers together. There are of course
a few explicit ordering conventions i.e. you have to start with
SIMPLE = T.


Another case where ordering may be implicit is in a sequence of HISTORY
keywords that document the order of data processing steps. In some
cases time stamps may have been added to each keyword to disambiguate
the order. This issue of keyword ordering was one of the main topics
of debate back when this convention was first introduced back in 1993
and 1994.

I doubt this CONTINUE statement will cause much trouble in practise,
but before approving it we might want to consider the more
general problems of implicit ordering.


Keep in mind that the approval process for adding a convention to the
Registry is mainly only designed to ensure that the documentation is
clear and complete. If a continuation convention were to be considered
for the FITS Standard, then a much more rigorous and formal approval
process would be required.

Bill Pence
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