Charlie,
I'm in general agreement with your proposal. I've got a question.
In the case where the new scheme replaces an old scheme, how should we
handle it in the documentation?
In the old Section 2.2, the basic gist (although curiously limited to
1-byte unsigned integers) is that you represent fill, max, and min using
their signed equivalents (the same bit pattern expressed as a signed
value). Once you adopt unsigned types, this approach is unnecessary and
mentioning it is confusing. Do we continue to talk about the old method, or
let the older versions of the Conventions carry the load?
Grace and peace,
Jim
==================
The current CF 1.8 draft reads (Section 2.2):
"The netCDF data types char, byte, short, int, 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 data
type. All integer types are treated by the netCDF interface as
signed. It is possible to treat the byte type as unsigned by using the
NUG convention of indicating the unsigned range using the valid_min,
valid_max, or valid_range attributes."
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