[fitsbits] further reopening of Public Comment Period on the CONTINUE convention]

[Walter Jaffe]

My comments are somewhat of an esthetic reaction, but esthetics of programming are important.

Typing of keywords has always been indirect and a bit obscure.  It is not directly evident
whether a floating point keyword is single or double precision, or an integer short or long.
To add the possibility that a STRING might be short or long adds more confusion.

A peculiarity of FITS keywords is that the order of the keywords in a header has no
semantic meaning with the possible exception of SIMPLE=TRUE.  This indifference to
order often causes some difficulties, but having been established
as a practice, I think that it is a bad idea to introduce a new variant where
the exact order of the CONTINUE statements is critical.

I recognize the importance of being able to specify long strings but prefer
either ad hoc solutions like those used to specify vectors:

SVALUE1 = ' first part of long string '
SVALUE2 = ' next part of long string '
...

or puting these strings in an extension as an ascii or binary table.

Walter