[AstroPy] Re: functional interface for PyFITS?

[Joe Harrington]

> Default should be to check if foo.fits[2] is a valid filename, read it 
> if it is, otherwise read the second extension of foo.fits.

No, that kind of fuzzy-logic behavior is very hard to follow if you're
writing a script and handling error behavior.  What if you have both
foo.fits and foo.fits[2] as filenames, and both have extensions?  How
do you tell which you got, if you weren't sure you had both?  You'd
have to have a relatively complex status variable that knew and
reported all the possible combinations, and you'd have to check it and
process all the possible errors.  Yuk.

--jh--