Am 21.08.2018 um 21:32 schrieb Allin Cottrell:

On Mon, 20 Aug 2018, Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti wrote:

Stata has a "saveold" command. As long as _new_ versions of gretl can save in the "old" format, we should be ok. How about

store --oldbinary

OK, I've now taken the plunge: NA is now NaN (internally) in git and snapshots. And I've followed Jack's suggestion of adding an --oldbinary option to "store" (not yet documented but it will be soon).

Sorry, I wanted to reply earlier - doesn't Stata (and other programs in similar situations) have a format version for their datafiles? I think it would be good if the conventions and incarnation of the data file would be visible to the user. OTOH I guess it's not easy to do because by definition old gretl versions cannot be updated to recognize this format information?
But perhaps for potential future changes such a meta information tag should be introduced?

Git users will notice that a lot of gretl source files have been modified today. The changes are mostly very minor, associated with getting rid of a lot of symbols, checks and transformations that were needed only because NA was not equivalent to NaN before.

Let's keep our fingers crossed and hope all goes well!

thanks,
sven