Inconsistent use of the "GCS_" and "D_" prefixes

[phaarnes]

Hi,

Almost all of your geographic CRSs have the GCS_ prefix, and the datums have the D_ prefix. However, I have stumbled upon several examples where the geographic CRS does not start with "GCS" and the datum does not start with "D_". Is there a specific reason why the ESRI PE CRS catalog is not 100% consistent with the ESRI naming convention for CRSs and datums?

Examples:

• RSAO13 EPSG:8699
  

  Here I would have expected GCS_RSAO13 as the name of the geographic CRS and D_Reference_System_de_Angola_2013 as the name of the datum.

• The datum Nouvelle Triangulation Francaise (Paris) EPSG:6807
  

• WGS 84 (G730) (EPSG:9053)
  

[melitakennedy]

This is more ancient history of the projection engine library. And many of these 'oddities' are due to me and first developer who went along with it! The GCS_ and D_ prefixes arose out of my desire to be able to identify which object is being used or wanted if you have only the name. Similarly, working with various *nix operating systems, I really wanted names to have underscores--no pesky spaces! Stupid, now in retrospect. A few years back, the team decided to drop the GCS_ and D_ from the names, and internally, if you use the projection engine to compare objects, we ignore those prefixes and underscores within names.

[phaarnes]

Okay, I see. Thank you for a quick response Melita!