Date: Mon, 05 Feb 2018 23:57:59 -0500 From: scs@eskimo.com (Steve Summit) Message-ID: <2018Feb05.2357.scs.0001@quinine.home> | In the beginning I would have thought that the project's product | was the database *and* the reference code, The reference code is a side issue, useful to show how to use the data, and to assist in verifying its correctness, but it is the data that matters. Note: the data, not the format in which it is expressed, that's an even smaller side issue. The part of all of this that is difficult (aside from attempting to make the code work on a zillion different systems in a sane way) is actually collecting and, as best as is possible, verifying the data. That is all that really matters. All the rest is just frills, and as anyone is free to take the collected data and write it down in whatever format they like, no-one should really be overly concerned with the format in which we write it, nor how often that changes. Getting as much data as possible, as accurately as we can determine it (down to tiny fractions of a second, when it matters) is all that is really important. When the format cannot represent the data, we change the format, never compromise the data. The format can also change just because something new happens to be more convenient. kre