To address the concern that Jim had "let slide" this draft changes "byte" to "byte, short, and int" to retroactively permit the practice that Jim sees in the wild of storing unsigned shorts as shorts by using the same workaround that CF 1.7 and earlier permit for byte. Courtesy also extended to int, though not to int64 since any such file should explicitly use uint64 not this dumb workaround:
"The netCDF data types char, byte, unsigned byte, short, unsigned short, int, unsigned int, int64, unsigned int64, float or real, and double are all acceptable. The char type is not intended for numeric data. One byte numeric data should be stored using the byte or unsigned byte data type. It is possible to treat the byte, short, or int type as unsigned by using the NUG convention of indicating the unsigned range using the valid_min, valid_max, or valid_range attributes. The convention explicitly distinguishes between signed and unsigned integer types only where necessary. Unless otherwise noted, int is interchangeable with unsigned int, int64, and unsigned int64 in this convention, including examples and appendices. Similarly short is interchangable with unsigned short, and byte with unsigned byte." -- Charlie Zender, Earth System Sci. & Computer Sci. University of California, Irvine 949-891-2429 )'( _______________________________________________ CF-metadata mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.cgd.ucar.edu/mailman/listinfo/cf-metadata
