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

[Peter Weilbacher]

Hi Demitri,

On Tue, 8 Mar 2016, Demitri Muna wrote:

> There is a standard here that is used in virtually every (every)
> computer language - continuation or concatenation characters are
> located outside of the string being quoted.

But we are not discussing a computer language here, but a file format.

> This also subverts the literal meaning of the quotes. Quotes
> specifically delineate the content. The ampersand inside the quotes
> will unquestionably be interpreted as a value in the string. This
> isn’t a question about parsing convenience (which isn’t difficult
> here) but rather nearly globally accepted usage.

I don't think that the FITS Standard allows to have anything between the
value and the '/' that starts the comment. At least that's how I
understand Section 4.1.1 and Appendix A. So having the continue
character outside the string literals would make a very fundamental
change to the FITS format. And quite hard on every FITS header parser.

> If the motivation is to turn into a standard something that someone
> else decided ad hoc to do, then I’d ask if this really is the best way
> to define standards? The fact that one institute did something doesn’t
> necessarily make it the best idea, and in this case I really don’t
> think it is.

The discussions about the CONTINUE discussion predate my time in
astronomy as well, but if you read up on the convention's history, you
will find quite a few messages to this list from 1993 and 94. So it was
not decided "ad-hoc" at all, and not by one institute, either. (I think
this is true for all the conventions that currently exist.)

I agree that this is not the most beautiful way to create FITS headers.
But since the motivation here is rather to have an incremental
improvement that works (we know, because it has seen usage for 20+
years) instead of reinventing the FITS format, I agree with the
proposal.

Cheers,
   Peter.
-- 
Dr. Peter M. Weilbacher             http://www.aip.de/People/PWeilbacher
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