[fitsbits] The CONTINUE and HIERARCH Conventions Public Comment Periods

LC's NoSpam Newsreading account nospam at mi.iasf.cnr.it
Tue Sep 18 06:39:48 EDT 2007


I have inspected the PDF description of the HIERARCH Convention in the 
registry and I have the following questions/comments.

0) Who is the author (or authority) which issued such document ?

1) I was of course aware of the usage of the HIERARCH convention at ESO
   and I think section 1 of the document provides an adequate 
   documentation of the generalized hierarchical convention while 
   leaving ESO specific details to the (quoted) DICB

2) The key characteristics of the general convention described in
   section 1 is that the first token defines a namespace.

   So any further details for namespace ESO are correctly referred
   to ESO documentation.

   Did anybody else use their own namespaces ?

   And who is the authority to prevent conflicts in the creation
   of namespaces ?


3) Although defined in a self-consisent manner, the content of
   section 2 is DEFINING AN ALTOGETHER DIFFERENT CONVENTION !

   In section 2 there is no namespace, or any token is a 
   namespace of its own.

   This seems to me a rather bad and confusing idea. It has nothing
   to with an "hierarchical" organization

   Unless such usage is already in widespread diffusion, I think
   we should try to stop it, and replace it with some cleaner
   alternative
   
   - define a specific namespace for long keywords e.g. one of

     HIERARCH LONGKWDS anysinglelongtoken = value / comment
     HIERARCH LONG anysinglelongtoken = value / comment

     (although this is a misuse of the name and a little space waste)

   - define an altogether new convention (with the same syntax of
     HIERARCH but eventually specifying there is a single token,
     and with the keyword name itself replaced by something else)

     LONGKWDS anysinglelongtoken = value / comment

     i.e. the 8-char kwd name is LONGKWDS, char 9 is blank so it is
     formally a commentary type keyword, and for the rest as for
     HIERARCH but ntoken=1

My idea is that we should register section 1 only as description of 
HIERARCH and perhaps register a separate LONGKWDS convention somehow 
replacing section 2.


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