Subject: Reminder!!! vote on IMAGE and Blocking

From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 04 May 94 09:49:37 +0200

Dear IAU-FWG members,
 Just to remind you that the deadline for voting on
the IMAGE and Blocking proposals is

              Friday, May 6, 1994, 18.00 GMT

i.e. in two days. Please be sure to submit your vote!!!

I have until now received votes from the following
members: D.Wells, W.Warren, B.Hanisch, B.Schlesinger
and W.Pence. If you have submitted your vote and is
not mentioned please resubmit it.

B.Hanisch reminded me that the proposals now are
available on fits.cv.nrao.edu in the directory
fits/documents/proposals with the names:

-r--r--r--  1 dwells       2183 Oct  1  1991 blocking90.txt
-r--r--r--  1 dwells      94980 Jun  4  1992 image.ps
-r--r--r--  1 dwells      12973 Mar 12  1992 image.tex

B.Schlesinger wrote:
> 	I would propose an alternative b3), (or perhaps b1')).  That
>approach would be to proceed now with approval of BINTABLE as it 
>stands without prejudice as to the future addition of unsigned 
>integers.  The idea would be that since there is no community 
>consensus at present in favor of unsigned integers, it would clearly
>be inappropriate to include them now, but, should the community so
>decide at a later time, they could then be added to BINTABLE as one or
>more additional data types.  Approval of such an addition would follow
>the regular procedure. 

Although everything is possible, it would be very difficult to
add new data types once the BINTABLE is agree to. The main
problem is that old readers which conform the original definition
but do not know the new would misinterpret data or fail. It is
correct that the introduction of IEEE floating point did make
old readers fail. This is very unfortunate and can only be
justified if there is a dramatic functional improvement. I
believe it was the case for IEEE-FP (due to the large dynamic
range of (reduced) astronomical data). A similar argument is
very difficult to make for unsigned integers.

Best regards,

Preben Grosbol
Chairman, IAU FITS WG