[fitswcs] Comments on Paper III

[William Pence]

Mark Calabretta wrote:
> 
> On Sat 2003/11/22 15:02:45 CDT, Jonathan McDowell wrote
> in a message to: fitswcs at donar.cv.nrao.edu
> 
> >Why the horizontal (1 row, array column) arrangement? For the simple
> >case (separable 1D axes) a vertical (many rows, scalar column)
> >arrangement seems much more natural and allows many existing calibration
> >lookup files to be used without change. You could then go to a 1D array
> >per cell for the 2D case, and so on, perhaps not as elegant then for the
> >higher dimensional cases - but these are rare!
> 
> Probably just allowing the column form as an alternative for a 1-D array
> would be better.  And maybe just in ASCII tables.

This is just a small point, and perhaps this was not intended, but I hope
you would not require that the column form could only be used in ASCII
tables and not binary tables as well.   The application program that reads
this type of -TAB table should not care whether it is an ASCII FITS table or
a binary FITS table; that is an implementation detail that should be left to
the designer/provider of the table to decide.  (But of course, the vector
cell form of the -TAB table would have to be a binary table).

Bill