Re: String representations of numeric values

From: Thomas McGlynn <tam-at-lheapop.gsfc.nasa.gov>
Date: Thu, 20 Apr 2006 15:20:25 -0400

Mark Taylor wrote:
> On Thu, 20 Apr 2006, Thomas McGlynn wrote:
>
>

>>While Roy and Dave may have hinted at this, let me say very
>>plainly that I think this is a bad idea.  Coordinates in
>>VOTables should be respresented in decimal degrees and
>>any other usage should be strongly discouraged.  Allowing
>>other formats makes the job of software which is to
>>read and write VOTables much harder and more error prone.

>
>
> I should clarify that I'm *not* suggesting that understanding these
> formats should be a requirement for compliant VOTable I/O software.
> The representation type would simply be an extra bit of information
> which software could use or ignore at its option. Thus it is not
> true that it makes the job of reading or writing VOTables any harder.
> It makes it easier for software which wishes to accommodate
> data in, e.g. ISO-8601 format, and imposes no additional burden on
> software which does not so wish. I would say introducing a new
> "representation" attribute is rather analogous to the introduction
> of the "utype" attribute in this respect.
>
> Mark
>

I don't think I agree. If I wish to be able to read compliant coordinates from VOTables (the most basic of operations), then my reader would need to be far more complex than it currently is. I'll grant you that I can copy the bytes of the VOTable onto my machine, but I can't do anything useful with them. There might be occasional programs that can ignore this -- one doesn't alway use coordinates or time-- but the vast majority of programs would either need to be cognizant of this practice or will have to ignore the tables that use it.

        Tom

P.S., I'm not so keen about utypes either but that's another story. P.P.S., At least you've gotten this newsgroup going again! Received on 2006-04-20Z21:20:58