[fitsbits] start of Public Comment Period on CONTINUE Long Kwd convention

[Erik Bray]

On 06/25/2015 10:36 AM, Lucio Chiappetti wrote:
> On Wed, 24 Jun 2015, van Nieuwenhoven, Richard wrote:
>
>> Our users where wondering why so much of the comments is thrown away depending
>> of the length of the string.
>
> Hmm ... personally I've never been very keen about / interested in comments
> (partial exception when units are indicated in comments).
>
> For me comments are intended to be human-readable while keyword values are
> intended to be computer-readable. In generally my homegrown programs simply
> discard the comment part ...

For some users comments are important.  Some observatories also have certain 
local requirements for what comments are included in deliverable files.

Furthermore, some comments are meant to be computer readable as well--FITS 
encodes the units of header values in comments, which can make a comment a very 
important piece of data.  Which of course is a shame because some software 
thinks it can just blithely truncate or ignore comments, when in fact they can 
be a critical part of the data model (and in fact are not really comments at all).

Erik