|
|
Thread Tools | Display Modes |
#1
|
|||
|
|||
[fitsbits] Proposed Changes to the FITS Standard
On Sun 2007-08-19T20:40:45 -0600, Doug Tody hath writ:
Regarding versioning - I don't think FITS has changed enough to warrant versioning. I agree. The horse is out of the barn on all of these issues, meaning that neither writers nor readers have been constrained to particular requirements, so everyone already may have to support them, but nobody can demand it. Picking up what has already been expressed, aside from "SHOULD", on the issues of particular controversy can the FITS standard include language akin to that which has always been in the Fortran standards; i.e., "the result is undefined"? Perhaps not, perhaps that's implicit, for in a Fortran compiler there are specific actions implied by every statement, whereas in FITS some interpretations of the document meaning have always been subject to implementation details. That may be a question of scope of effort on which it's not easy to get complete agreement in the community. I share the opinion that I would like to see FITS files be sufficiently regimented that they can be sucked into a data structure which resembles a normalized relational database, but that notion simply was not there from the start. Again, that sort of thing could be accommodated by adding a registry of conventions and a way of asserting which conventions are in use. Files asserting that they conform to certain conventions could be verified and read more straightforwardly than a totally generic FITS file. And again this is already implicit, for in the case of FITS files written for a particular purpose, the associated reading software ignores certain aspects of the file structure. I don't think can be anything that prevents us from explicitly declaring that certain FITS files are subsets of the FITS standard which conform to a specific vocabulary. But I'm gonna stop typing now, for in a few moments Endeavour and ISS are going overhead in close formation. -- Steve Allen WGS-84 (GPS) UCO/Lick Observatory Natural Sciences II, Room 165 Lat +36.99855 University of California Voice: +1 831 459 3046 Lng -122.06015 Santa Cruz, CA 95064 http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/ Hgt +250 m |
Thread Tools | |
Display Modes | |
|
|
Similar Threads | ||||
Thread | Thread Starter | Forum | Replies | Last Post |
[fitsbits] Proposed Changes to the FITS Standard | Doug Tody | FITS | 0 | August 18th 07 03:42 PM |
[fitsbits] Proposed Changes to the FITS Standard | Boud Roukema | FITS | 0 | August 18th 07 09:27 AM |
[fitsbits] Proposed Changes to the FITS Standard | Doug Tody | FITS | 0 | August 18th 07 04:15 AM |
[fitsbits] Proposed Changes to the FITS Standard | Jonathan McDowell | FITS | 0 | August 17th 07 09:32 PM |
[fitsbits] Proposed Changes to the FITS Standard | William Pence | FITS | 2 | July 24th 07 04:57 AM |