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

[Mark Calabretta]

On Mon, 29 Jun 2015 08:38:06 -0400
"Tom McGlynn (NASA/GSFC Code 660.1)" <tom.mcglynn at nasa.gov> wrote:

> It seems that your beef here is with FITSIO and its implementation of 
> long strings.

Nope.

>There is nothing in the standard which precludes long 
> string values and regular values from being retrieved using the same 
> method -- that's the case in at least some other FITS reading 
> libraries.

Yep.  In cfitsio it's called fits_read_key_longstr(), as I said in my
original and subsequent message.

> But just as you may be influenced by 
> the CFITSIO implementation,

Only partly.  WCSLIB contains a flex scanner for parsing WCS keywords.
It also includes a general-purpose flex scanner (fitshdr) for all valid
keyrecords (including CONTINUE'd strings, complex, integer complex, and
70-digit integers), which takes quite a different approach to cfitsio.
See http://www.atnf.csiro.au/people/mcalabre/WCS/wcslib/fitshdr_8h.html

None of this changes my original argument.

Regards,
Mark Calabretta