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

[Demitri Muna]

Hi,

My initial comments are:

- Are the single quotes necessary (providing any value?) as there isn’t expected to be anything else on the line?
- Shouldn’t the ampersand be located outside of the quoted string?
- Is there a benefit to a free form text field having a comment? Particularly as it might contain an unlimited number of lines?
- I think that if a line ends with an ampersand but the next does not contain the “CONTINUE” keyword, is should be an error. If it looks like an error (even acknowledged in the document), it should be an error.
- There should be no chance (particularly through an error!) that the continuation string (“&”) be assumed to be part of the long string. This is another argument to keep the continuation character outside of the quoted string.
- Is there a maximum number of lines? While the intent here is for strings of a few lines, this clearly lays out the red carpet for the possibility of megabytes of text. In software, whatever your intent it, expect users to exceed it by an order of magnitude.

Is the reason this specific format was chosen was that it is currently being implemented somewhere else?

I would also request the the LaTeX document for the documentation use the correct “straight” quote in the example headers. The document source is using straight single quotes, but these of course become a curly quote which is incorrect. This can be accomplished, for example, with the “\textquotesingle” macro in the textcomp package.

Demitri

_________________________________________
Demitri Muna
http://muna.com

Department of Astronomy
Ohio State University

My Projects:
http://nightlightapp.io
http://trillianverse.org
http://scicoder.org


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