Re: Timefmt bug, or not?

[<br...@ph...>]

Ethan A Merritt wrote:

> But it isn't, because the input parsing code in datafile.c
> assumes that something in quotes cannot be valid numeric
> (or in this case time format) data.
> 
> What do you think - is this a bug, or is it perfectly
> reasonable to say that input data should not be in quotes
> unless it really is string data?

IMHO it's a bug.

The problem is partly one of history here.  This was wrong in 4.0 
already, before the introduction of string data.  Back then, it was 
apparently meant to allow gnuplot to parse CSD (comma-separated data) 
files, in which non-numeric data are customarily quoted.