[fitsbits] The CONTINUE and HIERARCH Conventions Public Comment Periods

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On Thu, 20 Sep 2007, William Pence wrote:

> Both of these (the ESO hierarchical usage, and the long keyword name usage)
> are special cases of the more general convention that has been implemented in
> CFITSIO since 1999.  The general convention looks like this:
> 
> HIERARCH <Effective Keyword Name> = value / Comment String
>
> where <Effective Keyword Name> represents any string of ASCII text characters
> (except the equal sign character which is not allowed because it serves as the
> delimiter between the Effective Keyword Name and the value.  

OK, if you have enough evidence that the full convention as supported by 
CFITSIO is in use (beyond the ESO and long keyword cases) then the 
definition above should appear FIRST in the document for the registry !

My only comment then could be that HIERARCH is a misnomer, but that 
should be accepted on historical grounds.


> In the ESO special case, the Effective Keyword Name consists of a series of
> tokens that each conform to the requirements of a FITS keyword name. 
> 
> In the long keyword name special case, embedded spaces are not allowed to
> avoid confusion with the ESO usage, 

These should than be presented in the document as two clear 
subconventions of the general case.

My suggestion are :

 - to call the convention "Generalized keyword (HIERARCH) convention"
 - to copy your general definition in a prominent place at beginning
   of the document

 - to call the first subconvention "hierarchical (tokenized) 
   subconvention" ... the ESO case will be a sub-sub-case where
   the first token is 'ESO' !

 - to call the second subconvention "long keyword subconvention"


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