[Gretl-users] Re: Lost strings for bundled string-valued series

On Wed, 3 Mar 2021, atecon wrote: > I am not sure whether this is a bug or following gretl's specs: > Putting a string-valued series into a bundle and creating a new series > 'foo' using this 'bundled' series yields a numeric series 'foo'. I > would have expected the original string-valued series. Not a bug, IMO. Both series and lists are second-class citizens in bundles, since they're extracted from their natural habitat in a dataset. A "series" in a bundle is really just a column vector -- with no metadata -- that can be turned back into a series when pulled out of the bundle under the right conditions. (And a "list" in a bundle is just an array of integers that can be turned back into a list if conditions are right.) To preserve series metadata in a bundle would require that the "series" itself be stored as a bundle (numerical values plus attributes, perhaps including an array of strings). This is something that one could implement at the hansl level but there's no built-in support for it -- though I guess that could be a feature request.