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nanograv / PINT

PINT is not TEMPO3 -- Software for high-precision pulsar timing
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Mask parameters have unhelpful names #1059

Open aarchiba opened 3 years ago

aarchiba commented 3 years ago

A parfile line that looks like

JUMP -fe Rcvr_800 -3.26e-6

will produce a parameter on the timing model mo.JUMP17 or something. It is not clear how the number 17 is assigned to this JUMP, or whether this is consistent in the face of par file changes (for example re-ordering lines, or adding or removing other JUMPs). This makes comparing par files difficult.

I suggest constructing the names of mask parameters in some more consistent way. Perhaps JUMP_fe_Rcvr_800 for this one? Some care must be taken to ensure that the names are unique and also valid Python identifiers; perhaps just substituting all questionable characters with _ and appending a number if necessary would resolve this.

Such a change would impact user code that relies on naming parameters by number, including all NANOGrav yaml configurations, but that code is almost certainly broken anyway - minor changes can unexpectedly result in renaming JUMPs.

aarchiba commented 3 years ago

Is there any objection to simply naming them NAME_key_value or NAME_key_value1_value2? Implementation will be a little cumbersome (some values are not acceptable python strings) but can be done.