[fitsbits] Five FITS Proposals

[Joe Hourcle]

On Oct 24, 2013, at 3:06 PM, Rob Seaman wrote:

> On Oct 23, 2013, at 10:13 AM, William Pence <William.Pence at nasa.gov> wrote:
> 
>> During the recent FITS Birds-of-a-Feather session at the ADASS meeting on Sept 30th, there was some discussion about the shortcomings of the current FITS format.
> 
> I missed the BoF but have read the discussion on the associated mailing list.  They are writing up a white paper with extensive not-very-appreciative comments.  It would be best to separate the characterization of the perceived problem space from entertaining possible solutions.  

[trimmed]

If you're looking for alternate proposals that won't create non-backwards-compatable files ... I think I can solve 1 & 3:

	Create an 'ALIAS' comment that would allow for a longer variable names w/ additional characters.

So, to use variations on the examples that Bill linked to:


	0        1         2         3         4         5         6         7         8
	12345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890
	
	MY_SVK  = 'Mary had a little lamb'  / string value
	ALIAS MY_STRING_VALUED_KEYWORD
	
	MY_LK   =     T   / this keyword has a logical value
	ALIAS my_logical_keyword
	
	MAXALEXP= 3600 / [s]  time in units of seconds
	ALIAS maximum_allowed_exposure_time
	
	FLUX_PC1=  4500.                    /  These are a series of
	ALIAS FLUX_POLYNOMIAL_COEFFICIENT1
	FLUX_PC1=  11.0                     /  indexed keywords which have
	ALIAS FLUX_POLYNOMIAL_COEFFICIENT2
	FLUX_PC1=  0.015                    /  the form KEYWORDn where
	ALAIS FLUX_POLYNOMIAL_COEFFICIENT3 
	FLUX_PC1=  0.000078                 /  'n' is the index number
	ALIAS FLUX_POLYNOMIAL_COEFFICIENT4

The main drawback is that it'd require an extra card per key/value pair, and it doesn't give any additional space for variables, as you'd still be limited to I think it's ~ 38**8 unique combinations.

... and I'm not sure how to work this into the long string proposal ... but I *do* prefer the new proposal over CONTINUE, as a string ending in '\' would be give people a clue that they're missing something.


-Joe

-----
Joe Hourcle
Programmer/Analyst
Solar Data Analysis Center
Goddard Space Flight Center