[Gretl-users] 'store' issues

[Sven Schreiber]

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