Speaking as someone that has been trying to make sense of very diverse CF files 
with nothing but the CF-Convention in my hand, I have to say the fact that 
dimension coordinates can be identified by name and dimension being the same is 
a good thing.

It is very hard to correctly identify, for example, auxiliary coordinates and 
cell_measures because this status can not be inferred from the variables 
themselves, but only from analyzing all relevant variables. This is possible in 
an ad-hoc fashion, but hard to implement in a parser. It becomes harder when 
"all relevant variables" might be spread over several files or exist only in an 
object storage or similar.

Generally, the convention does a good job of telling people with data how to 
put this into netcdf files. It is far more difficult to work with in the other 
direction.
Keeping dimensional variables easily identifiable is a good step in that 
direction and so I personally support strongly to forbid `string x(x):`.

In fact, I would like to see CF move in a direction where it becomes easier to 
identify the character of all variables, but that is a discussion for another 
day.

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