[fitsbits] BINTABLE convention for >999 columns

[Rob Seaman]

On 7/7/17 7:24 AM, Thompson, William T. (GSFC-671.0)[ADNET SYSTEMS INC]
wrote:

> On 7/7/17 10:03 AM, Mark Taylor wrote:
>> Examples include the compression conventions, that were for some
>> time not part of the standard but at v4.0 are, and the ESO HIERARCH
>> keyword which is still not part of the standard but is quite widely
>> used.
>> Some software supports these things, some doesn't.  It's OK.

The motivation for moving conventions into the standard was to avoid
precisely this situation.

> While these conventions may not have been officially part of the
> standard, they did have wide community support.  The use-cases were
> well established.

Actually, since a tile-compressed table is transposed it may already
support an unlimited number of columns. For that matter a 999+ column
table could benefit from compression :-)

Rob