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 )'(
Received on Thu Sep 21 2017 - 12:12:35 BST
