[fitsbits] Bintable proposals

[Don Wells]

Lucio Chiappetti writes:
 > ..On the other hand concerning "preallocation" one snag of FITS
 > used for acquisition.. is that one has to preallocate space for the
 > header to store history keywords, or shift down the data part of
 > the HDU. Probably the easiest thing would be to add all history,
 > administration and documentation keywords to an "header only" HDU
 > postponed after the data.

This is not a problem with the multiple-file real-time disk solution
which I described in an earlier posting: the disk files which contain
the headers can be extended as much as desired, even while continuous
high-speed writing of the BINTABLE data files is occurring. The END
records need not be written to the headers until the final close of
the whole set of files and the marking of the table of contents file
as 'ready to archive'.

-Don
-- 
  Donald C. Wells      Scientist - GBT Project        dwells at nrao.edu
                    http://www.cv.nrao.edu/~dwells
  National Radio Astronomy Observatory                +1-434-296-0277
  520 Edgemont Road,   Charlottesville, Virginia       22903-2475 USA
       (DCW is often in Green Bank, West Virginia, at +1-304-456-2146)