[Matrix-SIG] re: advocacy

[Perry Greenfield]

Konrad Hinsen writes
> 
> The best interactive environment for Python work is Emacs, in my
> opinion. It does:
[many useful emacs comments deleted]

Well, it is true that many of these things are available from emacs,
but telling people they have to use emacs to get these features turns
a lot of users off. Emacs users (and I am one) around here are a
distinct minority; we simply cannot tell people that they should use it
if we want them to use our software.

> > Hopefully the FITS issue will be solved soon--I'm eagerly looking forward to
> > Paul's implementation. (And make that ~5 FITS implementations; I did a 
> 
> Just out of curiosity - could someone give a short explanation
> for non-astronomers what FITS really is?
> 
FITS (Flexible Image Transport System) was a format originally designed
to be 1) a standard interchange format for astronomical data and 2) an
archival format as well. It was originally intended for use in writing 
tapes. The original format was fairly simple; data files consisted of a
header section followed by a data block. The header section consisted of
some number of 80 character ascii records with most having some sort of
<keyword> = <value> pair. In this way, all the revelvant information for
observations was stored in the header along with information about the
size, data type and structure of the data itself. Later, the standard was
extended to allow multiple header/data sets within one file, and to allow
other types of data such as tabular data. Since this format became widely
used, many now want programs to operate on disk files of this format directly.

Its primary benefit is that it is standardized amongst astronomers. 
But it lacks the flexibility and generality of more modern data format
such as HDF (though that particular format does not appear to serve as a
good archival format). This inflexibility (or clumsiness) causes us problems
in trying to store more complex data sets using FITS format. It is not clear
to me how useful it would be outside of astronomy. There are a number of 
libraries available that can access such data. This url gives links to
detailed specifications for the format:

http://fits.gsfc.nasa.gov/fits_intro.html

Perry Greenfield