Re: gnuplot slow on BIG files

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

Robert Hart wrote:

> Questions: Where did this "NO_FORTRAN_NUMS" option come from, 

 From discussions a while back, which I now only dimly remember.
The Fortran numbers parsing was added because people insisted they 
needed it.  But it has a potential conflict with certain date/time
formats (those that have "Dec" immediately following a number, which was 
being overwritten to "eec" by the attempt to parse it as a Fortran 
number), and it makes things slow.

> and why isn't it enabled? 

Because that would break reading of datafiles that people care about.

 > Is Fortran number support useful?

Yes.

> Could it be provided in an alternative way (perhaps a run time
> option)?

Probably.