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