Comments on NOST 100-1.2

[Arnold Rots]

Hear, hear!
It's not so much a question of whether FITS will ever include unsigned
integer data types, but when.  Having been at the center of the
previous major effort to get them accepted, some five years ago, I 
would estimate that it's going to be another ten years ;-)

  - Arnold

John E. Davis wrote:
> On 8 Jul 1998 09:56:51 -0400, JENNINGS Don <Don.Jennings at obs.unige.ch>
> wrote:
> >The desire for support of unsigned integers has, I believe,
> >been expressed before. Fortuantely, there is a way to store
> >unsigned integers in the current FITS standard using the
> >BZERO (for primary arrays and IMAGEs) and TZEROn (for
> >BINTABLEs) keywords. See the CFITSIO Users manual for more
> >details.
> 
> I think that this hack should be done away with in favor of real
> support for unsigned values.  About the only reason I can see for not
> adding such support is that older readers may have problems reading
> the files with unsigned values.  But that's life--- software must
> evolve.
> 
> --John
> 

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Arnold H. Rots                                         AXAF Science Center
Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory                tel:  +1 617 496 7701
60 Garden Street, MS 81                              fax:  +1 617 495 7356
Cambridge, MA 02138                             arots at head-cfa.harvard.edu
USA                                     http://hea-www.harvard.edu/~arots/
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