[Gretl-users] 'store' issues

[Allin Cottrell]

On Sun, 17 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!

Done, in CVS.

>> 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.

For now, in CVS I have, for example, "1975Q3" for quarterly, and
"2004M07" for monthly (without the surrounding quotes in the 
actual CSV file).  I have made sure that CVS gretl can read these 
formulations back from CSV and get the dates right.

> (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.)

Yes.

> 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.

I see your point.  My concern is to ensure that gretl doesn't 
become a vector for malware.  Maybe this is paranoid, but paranoia 
seems reasonable given the current state of the internet.  Anyone 
else have thoughts on this?

Allin.