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

[William Pence]

I'd like to take a step back to view the bigger picture here:

Simply put, the proposal that we are discussing here is to incorporate 
the CONTINUE convention into the FITS standard in order to provide a way 
to record FITS string-valued keywords that are too long to fit on a 
single header record.  The CONTINUE convention has been successfully 
used for more than 22 years by several major observatories and it is 
supported by many of the commonly used FITS software libraries.

The motivation for developing the CONTINUE convention in the first place 
was to provide a standard way for projects to read and write long-string 
valued keywords in support of their own individual project or mission. 
The CONTINUE convention was never envisioned to be used with any of the 
approximately 30 string-valued keywords that are defined in the FITS 
standard.  Indeed, as far as I am aware, most FITS users find the 
current 68-character limit more than adequate for all of these keywords.

Since allowing the CONTINUE convention to be used with the mandatory and 
reserved keywords in the FITS standard would provide little or no added 
benefit and would potentially cause problems for existing software that 
reads those keywords, it was suggested to add the following sentence to 
end of the proposed text (which can be seen at 
http://sax.iasf-milano.inaf.it/~lucio/FITS/Conventions/continue-rev2.pdf):

"The CONTINUE keyword must not be used with of any of the mandatory or
reserved keywords defined in this standard unless explicitly stated
otherwise."

Assuming that this sentence is added to the proposal, does anyone have 
any remaining issues with the proposal as it is currently written?

-Bill
-- 
____________________________________________________________________
Dr. William Pence    Astrophysicist     William.Pence at nasa.gov
NASA/GSFC Code 662     [Emeritus]       +1-301-286-4599 (voice)
Greenbelt MD 20771                      +1-301-286-1684 (fax)