[OSRS-PROJ] Re: Maidenhead grids fair game for proj?

[Duncan Agnew]

I would argue strongly against adding Maidenhead references to PROJ: it
really is apples and oranges. PROJ takes, as input and output, pairs
of real numbers: lat/long and x/y. The Maidenhead system encodes lat/long
into a (limited-precision) alphanumeric string, referring to a region,
not a point (the precision is extensible, I admit). There are very many
such regionalizations: Marsden squares, Flinn-Engdahl regions, the Military
Grid Reference System [based on UTM], the new US National Grid Reference
system, and on and on.

This is not to deny the value of having such routines, but they should
be kept separate from the proj and cs2cs routines, since their output is
a different kind of thing (and not invertible).

Duncan Agnew
dagnew at ucsd.edu
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