[fitswcs] WCS documents

[Mark Calabretta]

On Fri 2001/10/12 08:59:26 CST, Eric Greisen wrote
in a message to: Arnold Rots <arots at head-cfa.harvard.edu>
and copied to: pence at tetra.gsfc.nasa.gov (William Pence),
      teuben at astro.umd.edu (Peter Teuben),
      fitswcs at primate.aoc.NRAO.EDU (fitswcs at primate.aoc.NRAO.EDU)

>Arnold Rots writes:
> > It has one major disadvantage: the definition of the units list -
> > which I don't think is controversial - may be held up by mixing it
> > with the square brackets proposal - which I think is controversial.
> > 
>
>Why do you thing it so controversial?  It is at most a recommended
>practise and for reasons I have already stated can never be promoted
>to a higher level.  I was about to suggest the following Paragrah to
>be added to Paper I following the CUNITns paragraph.

It's not clear whether the "[]" units proposal is supposed to be machine
readable or just an assist to human readers.  If machine readable then it
would be contentious because it's questionable grammar to put semantic
content inside comments.  Precedents that come to mind, e.g. "%%" in the
PostScript DSC, vectorizing FORTRAN compiler directives, and HTML meta-
markups <!MyPrivateMarkup>, are all meta-constructs.

Anyway, I think it's premature to mention "[]" in paper I.  Instead, the
separate "[]" proposal should reference paper I which means that paper I
has to be ratified first and provides yet another reason to do so.

Mark Calabretta