On Tue, 10 Nov 2015, oleg_komashko(a)ukr.net wrote:
Gretl eats arbitrary extensions for text data files! I've just
opened "401K.booo" My first mistake was as follows: I didn't think
an official book site would'n check known econometric software for
data files extensions. I'd say they are biased against GNU software.
Acually I wouldn't say anyone is to blame here. The ".dat" extension
has been used by many programs over the years to indicate a data file
of some type, usually a plain text format but sometimes binary. It's
no-one's "property". It just happens that JMulTi uses it for a quite
specific text format, and some years back we wrote an importer for
that format and assigned the ".dat" extension to it.
If there's any blame to assign, it's for using such a non-specific
suffix, presumably on the presumption that nobody will ever want to
open your data other than in your own program. However, gretl is
arguably quilty of the same sort of thing with our generic ".inp"
suffix for script files. It's a legacy thing, from before people
became savvy about mime types and all that.
Allin