VOUnits 20130922

[Frederic V. Hessman]

Sorry - forgot about sol*

I think is this adequate for now - don't want to try to do too much too soon unless one has a long-term solution. <physicalproperty>_<object> should be made possible in the next generation where the metadata control is better.

"...which have in the past, possibly surprisingly, generated a great deal of rhetorical heat within the IVOA without, so far, a generally acceptable resolution."
… is a bit heavy-handed.

I think there should be a means of insisting that "furlongs/week" (the funny example in the doc) be recognized as such and not femto-urlongs/week.  Shouldn't one have a means of insisting that a parser NOT attempt to parse, e.g. "\\furlongs/week" or "{furlongs}/week" ?

Rick

On 23 Sep 2013, at 11:28, Norman Gray <norman at astro.gla.ac.uk> wrote:

> 
> Rick, hello.
> 
> On 2013 Sep 23, at 08:25, Frederic V. Hessman wrote:
> 
>> What solar units ARE supported by the Unity library?
> 
> There are solLum, solMass and solRad defined in the document (and supported by the library).  The VOUnits document had rather vague language about using 'Sun' as a suffix to indicate solar values, but without any accompanying syntax.
> 
> These had come from the FITS and CDS specs, which say (FITS) "Miscellaneous units: Sun (relative to Sun, eg, abundances)" and (CDS) "Sun: Unit referring to the Sun (e.g. abundances)", but don't give any indication at all of how these are supposed to be used.  I _suppose_ the intention was something like 'T_Sun' or 'TSun', but those are a guess, and there's neither specification nor example to go on.
> 
> One can imagine a '<physicalproperty> "_" <object>' grammatical element, but that'd require a list of <physicalproperty> and presumably a list of <object> alongside 'Sun', and while there's been at least one remark in that direction, and while I did spend a few minutes thinking about this, it seemed to promise a lot of text for a rather marginal use-case.
> 
> Do you feel strongly about this?
> 
> All the best,
> 
> Norman
> 
> 
> -- 
> Norman Gray  :  http://nxg.me.uk
> SUPA School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, UK
> 

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