Sorry, all, there's a little churn going on here. But given the 't'
in gretl I think we should spend a little time -- and tolerate some
devel churn if need be -- to get our time-handling to a level
comparable with, say, R and python.
Here's an illustration of the latest state of play with no comment
as yet -- except that the "strtime" function I mentioned earlier is
now renamed as "strftime". Some of you will recognize "strftime" and
"strptime" as C library functions, which have been adopted under the
same names by other software that takes time seriously.
<hansl>
matrix tm = $now
eval strftime(tm[1])
tt = strptime(20161225)
eval strftime(tt)
tt = strptime("2016-12-25")
eval strftime(tt)
tt = strptime("Thursday 02/07/2019", "%A %m/%d/%Y")
eval strftime(tt)
</hansl>
Allin