Chris' suggestion is clearer and I think should be adopted.
Draft text to support new atomic integer types in Section 2.2 is now:
"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. Unsigned types should be used for unsigned
data if possible. If the underlying file format does not support
unsigned types, byte, short, or int types can be treated 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."
Some will wonder whether this sentence is redundant:
"One byte numeric data should be stored using the byte
or unsigned byte data type."
It too is copied from CF 1.7, and I think its intent was to tell
people to store 1-byte numeric data as type byte not type char.
With that rationale, if the sentence was in 1.7 then
it should probably be in 1.8, although I'll go with
the consensus.
--
Charlie Zender, Earth System Sci. & Computer Sci.
University of California, Irvine 949-891-2429 )'(
Received on Thu Sep 21 2017 - 17:54:26 BST
