[iaufwg] New draft FITS Standard

[Dick Shaw]

Recognizing such a type sounds potentially useful. But I suspect it would be 
better to finalize v3.0 soon in nearly its current form, and defer new 
technical discussions such as this (and, say, CHECKSUM and tiled compression) 
to v3.1.

Cheers,
Dick

On Fri, 23 Nov 2007 17:22:11 -0500 (EST)
  Arnold Rots <arots at head.cfa.harvard.edu> wrote:
> While I have restrained myself from bringing up the issue of
> recognizing unsigned integer data types during the earlier discussion,
> it struck me while reading through the comments that it might have
> been useful to add ISO-8601 datetime to the recognized data types.
> I *think* DATExxxx are the only keywords defined as a string where the
> format is prescribed. Adopting datetime as a data type in its own
> right would remove this anomaly.
> I would argue that this is no different from accepting T and F as
> representing a separate logical data type.
> What this opens up, of course, is the possibility of also allowing
> the datetime type to be used in table extensions.
> 
> I hate bringing this kind of thing up at such a late date (or, rather,
> I'm sure people will hate me for it), and the amount of extra work
> involved may be more than we can afford to expend right now, but I
> think that the issue should at least be raised.