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Date: Mon, 7 Dec 92 12:46:53 EST

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Date: Mon, 7 Dec 92 12:47:13 EST
From: [email-masked] (William Pence)
To: [email-masked]
Subject: Re: Is anyone not ready to vote?
Cc: [email-masked]
Sender: [email-masked]

As a point of clarification, can someone please verify that 
this vote only formally applies to the main body of each FITS proposal,
and not to the appendices.  In the case of the binary table
extension, I would like to see a small change made to Appendix B
(see below), and I would also like to see a paragraph added somewhere
(perhaps to Appendix A, or possibly as a separate appendix) describing
the convention for defining arrays of fixed-length character
strings via the TFORMn = 'rAw' syntax.

And, assuming that this vote does not cover the appendices, just what
is the procedure for revising the appendices or submitting new ones.

-Bill Pence

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Proposed change to Appendix B of the 'Binary Table Extension to FITS'

The FITSIO software package supports an extension to the format of
the TFORM keyword in binary tables to handle arrays of fixed length
characters strings.  The supported format has the form:

	TFORMn = 'rAw'

where  'r' is an integer specifying the total number of characters
in the field, and 'w' is an optional integer specifying the width
of a unit character string within the field.  For instance, '20A10'
indicates that the field is 20 characters in length and contains
2 10-character strings.  Note that this format for the TFORM keyword
is legal because the binary table definition document specifically
allows any additional characters to follow the datatype code character.

Appendix B of the binary table definition document proposes that the
TFORM keyword may have the form:

	rPt(maxelem)

where t is a character denoting the datatype of the array data 
(L, X, B, I, J, A, etc.).

I would like to see this modified slightly to have the form:

	rPtw(maxelem)

where the 'w' is an optional integer used to specify the length of
a unit string when the field contains an array of characters (i.e.,
then 't' = A).  An example of this useage is:

TFORMn = 'PA8(80)'

which indicates that the field contains a varable number of 8-character
strings, and that the field has a maximum width of 80 characters (= 10
strings).

This proposed convention is optional and does not preclude other
conventions (e.g., the TDIM convention described in Appendix A).