[fitsbits] keyword order

[William Pence]

Tom Kuiper wrote:
> 
> Noted that keyword order is not guaranteed.  Thanks for that advice.
> 
> I'm concerned about the COMMENT and HISTORY keywords.  If a comment or
> history entry exceeds 72 characters, it must span two or more header entries.
> One would not like to see these garbled.  How can one avoid this?

In practice, most software does preserve the keyword order, so it will
probably be OK to implicitly assume that the order and position of the
COMMENT and HISTORY keywords is significant, at least for human readers of a
listing of the header.  I seem to recall seeing some FITS files where the
COMMENT or HISTORY keywords contained a sequence number (or maybe a time
stamp) so that the order was explicitly defined, but this is not typically
done.

Bill Pence 
-- 
____________________________________________________________________
Dr. William Pence                          pence at tetra.gsfc.nasa.gov
NASA/GSFC Code 662         HEASARC         +1-301-286-4599 (voice)     
Greenbelt MD 20771                         +1-301-286-1684 (fax)