Allin Cottrell schrieb:
On Sat, 16 Dec 2006, Sven Schreiber wrote:
OK, I agree that's not an unreasonable expectation. I'll modify
"store"
to do that, but leave the option of using a leading dot to mean "save in
the PWD", as in
store ./foo.csv --csv
thanks, that's great!
I'm inclined to remove all quotes, since none of the fields will have
embedded commas, or embedded spaces.
sounds good
What do you think of the idea, for quarterly and monthly data, of
putting in the "date" or "obs" field the date which opens the period,
in
YYYY-MM-DD notation (or YYYY/MM/DD??). This would mean that a
spreadsheet program ought to be able to get the time-series information
right. For annual we'd just print the year.
Well, the disadvantage is that a parser could not infer the frequency
from one date alone. (Apart from the special-casing issue for annual
data.) So I would rather keep something like yyyyq and yyyymm; in
principle we don't need any separator at all, the rule "4 digits:
annual, 5 digits: quarterly, 6 digits: monthly: 8 digits: daily" would
be enough. However, I can also see the virtue of being a little more
explicit, so some separator characters are fine with me.
(Oh, I almost forgot about weekly data, but I guess the gretl's current
practice of using starting days' dates is the best one can do.)
> Btw, the background for all this is that I want to manage data in
> gretl and then pass them to specialized python programs...
Ah, I'm all in favour of computer-friendliness! I'll try to cooperate.
May I repeat the question about the (im)possibility of shell escapes
('!') in functions? Then one could call any external engine one likes
and provide a nice gretl function package interface for others (and
oneself). For example it may also be nice to plug in some R routines in
this way.
good night,
sven