Re: [guppi-list] White-paper on ASCII import

[Jon Trowbridge <trow emccta com>]

Nielsen on Tue, Nov 03, 1998 at 12:46:05AM +0100

Asger,

> [lengthy white paper omitted]

This sounds really great.  I'm excited to see how it comes out.
A few almost trivial comments:

> In general, empty lines are always ignored.

A nice Unixism that might be worth preserving would be to have
lines preceeded by # also be ignored as comments.

> Dynamic preview
> ---------------

This part is crucial.  The import engine should be pretty good at
"doing the right thing" when confronted by a not-too-complicated
situation.  This is key to having a nice "automatic" data import into
Guppi.  One of the things I've always liked about Excel is that the
Import thingie is pretty good in figuring out the structure of the
data you want to import.  Not great, but pretty good.  I want Goose
(and hence Guppi) to, in the end, leave that damn little "Wizard" in
the dust.

On a related note, maybe it would make sense to allow for some sort
of structured comments containing "import hints".  So if I was writing
some little Perl script that spits out data, I could have it print
something like this at the top:
#*# Col=1 Type=Date(YYYY-MM-DD) Sep=\t Name="Date"
#*# Col=2 Type=Percent Name="Bar"
#*# Col=3 Pos=40-50 Type=Real Name="Foo"
And then, seeing this, would dispense with trying to figure out what
to do and would just follow the directions.  (I'm not trying to
suggest what the description language should actually look like by
this example... it is just supposed to be evocative.)

-JT