Re: [Gretl-devel] redefining "NA"
On Mon, 20 Aug 2018, Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti wrote:
On Mon, 20 Aug 2018, Allin Cottrell wrote:
>
> There's a potential compatibility issue with the gdtb binary data file
> format. Backward compatibility will be preserved: there's code in place to
> ensure that "new gretl" will handle old gdtb files OK (converting missing
> values from DBL_MAX to NaN on reading). But "forward compatibility" is
> likely to be at least partially broken. That is, gdtb files written by "new
> gretl" (and containing NAs) will not be handled correctly by "old
gretl".
> Two
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).
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.
Allin