Subject: WGAS FITS Committee voting

From: dwells (Don Wells)
Date: Wed, 7 Apr 93 16:36:25 EDT

Dear WGAS FITS Committee members,

We still need to hold a vote on the three pending FITS proposals.
Four months ago we deferred the vote in order to consider adding
arrays of strings to the BINTABLE proposal. The discussions of that
proposed modification have occurred in private Email, and as of today
we appear to have an agreement. Therefore, I am alerting the WFC that
I intend to hold the call-for-votes during the next week (12-16
April); I have not yet decided precisely which day it will be. If any
of you have some problem with this please send me private Email.

The anonymous-FTP server fits.cv.nrao.edu [192.33.115.8] contains the
following three files in directory FITS/Documents:

  -r--r--r--  1 dwells       2183 Oct  1  1991 FITS_blocking90.txt
  -r--r--r--  1 dwells     179394 Sep 23  1991 X_bintable.ps
  -r--r--r--  1 dwells      94980 Jun  4 15:36 X_image.ps

These are the three proposals which the European FITS Committee has
already approved, and which WFC will be considering. If you have not
already examined these and formed an opinion, please do so *NOW*.

I am expecting that the text of an additional appendix for the
X_bintable document will be provided to WFC by Bill Pence within a few
days.  The text of this appendix will specify a convention for
substrings in a string (A) field; to do this it will append characters
to the basic TFORM code. It will be of the form rAw/nnn, where r is
the total length of the string field, w is the fixed, blank-padded
substring length, and /nnn is the optional numeric code for a printing
character to act as a delimeter for variable length strings. If the
delimeter is provided the w is interpreted as the maximum substring
length. This layered convention will provide the functionality which
is desired as an upwardly compatible feature of the basic BINTABLE
definition. This means that approval of this convention by WGAS will
not be in conflict with the approval of basic BINTABLE by the European
FITS Committee.

-Don

Donald C. Wells             Associate Scientist        [email-masked]
National Radio Astronomy Observatory                   +1-804-296-0277
520 Edgemont Road                                 Fax= +1-804-296-0278
Charlottesville, Virginia 22903-2475 USA            78:31.1W, 38:02.2N