The Graphics Interchange Format is a bitmap image format that was developed by a team at the online services provider CompuServe led by American computer scientist Steve Wilhite on June 15, 1987. It has since come into widespread usage on the World Wide Web due to its wide support and portability between applications and operating systems.
Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) is an Internet standard that extends the format of email messages to support text in character sets other than ASCII, as well as attachments of audio, video, images, and application programs. Message bodies may consist of multiple parts, and header information may be specified in non-ASCII character sets. Email messages with MIME formatting are typically transmitted with standard protocols, such as the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), the Post Office Protocol (POP), and the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP).
In computing, tar is a computer software utility for collecting many files into one archive file, often referred to as a tarball, for distribution or backup purposes. The name is derived from "tape archive", as it was originally developed to write data to sequential I/O devices with no file system of their own. The archive data sets created by tar contain various file system parameters, such as name, timestamps, ownership, file access permissions, and directory organization. The command line utility was first introduced in the Version 7 Unix in January 1979, replacing the tp program. The file structure to store this information was standardized in POSIX.1-1988 and later POSIX.1-2001, and became a format supported by most modern file archiving systems.
A text file is a kind of computer file that is structured as a sequence of lines of electronic text. A text file exists stored as data within a computer file system. In operating systems such as CP/M and MS-DOS, where the operating system does not keep track of the file size in bytes, the end of a text file is denoted by placing one or more special characters, known as an end-of-file marker, as padding after the last line in a text file. On modern operating systems such as Microsoft Windows and Unix-like systems, text files do not contain any special EOF character, because file systems on those operating systems keep track of the file size in bytes. There are for most text files a need to have end-of-line delimiters, which are done in a few different ways depending on operating system. Some operating systems with record-orientated file systems may not use new line delimiters and will primarily store text files with lines separated as fixed or variable length records.
In computer science, Base64 is a group of binary-to-text encoding schemes that represent binary data in an ASCII string format by translating it into a radix-64 representation. The term Base64 originates from a specific MIME content transfer encoding. Each Base64 digit represents exactly 6 bits of data. Three 8-bit bytes can therefore be represented by four 6-bit Base64 digits.
Newline is a control character or sequence of control characters in a character encoding specification that is used to signify the end of a line of text and the start of a new one. Some text editors set this special character when pressing the ↵ Enter key.
uuencoding is a form of binary-to-text encoding that originated in the Unix programs uuencode and uudecode written by Mary Ann Horton at UC Berkeley in 1980, for encoding binary data for transmission in email systems.
The archiver, also known simply as ar, is a Unix utility that maintains groups of files as a single archive file. Today, ar is generally used only to create and update static library files that the link editor or linker uses and for generating .deb packages for the Debian family; it can be used to create archives for any purpose, but has been largely replaced by tar for purposes other than static libraries. An implementation of ar is included as one of the GNU Binutils.
A comma-separated values (CSV) file is a delimited text file that uses a comma to separate values. Each line of the file is a data record. Each record consists of one or more fields, separated by commas. The use of the comma as a field separator is the source of the name for this file format. A CSV file typically stores tabular data in plain text, in which case each line will have the same number of fields.
Ctags is a programming tool that generates an index file of names found in source and header files of various programming languages to aid code comprehension. Depending on the language, functions, variables, class members, macros and so on may be indexed. These tags allow definitions to be quickly and easily located by a text editor, a code search engine, or other utility. Alternatively, there is also an output mode that generates a cross reference file, listing information about various names found in a set of language files in human-readable form.
gretl is an open-source statistical package, mainly for econometrics. The name is an acronym for GnuRegression, Econometrics and Time-seriesLibrary.
Netpbm is an open-source package of graphics programs and a programming library. It is used mainly in the Unix world, where one can find it included in all major open-source operating system distributions, but also works on Microsoft Windows, macOS, and other operating systems.
Stata is a general-purpose statistical software package created in 1985 by StataCorp. Most of its users work in research, especially in the fields of economics, sociology, political science, biomedicine, and epidemiology.
The LDAP Data Interchange Format (LDIF) is a standard plain text data interchange format for representing LDAP directory content and update requests. LDIF conveys directory content as a set of records, one record for each object. It also represents update requests, such as Add, Modify, Delete, and Rename, as a set of records, one record for each update request.
EViews is a statistical package for Windows, used mainly for time-series oriented econometric analysis. It is developed by Quantitative Micro Software (QMS), now a part of IHS. Version 1.0 was released in March 1994, and replaced MicroTSP. The TSP software and programming language had been originally developed by Robert Hall in 1965. The current version of EViews is 11, released in April 2019.
PLY is a computer file format known as the Polygon File Format or the Stanford Triangle Format. It was principally designed to store three-dimensional data from 3D scanners. The data storage format supports a relatively simple description of a single object as a list of nominally flat polygons. A variety of properties can be stored, including: color and transparency, surface normals, texture coordinates and data confidence values. The format permits one to have different properties for the front and back of a polygon. There are two versions of the file format, one in ASCII, the other in binary.
TSP is a programming language for the estimation and simulation of econometric models. TSP stands for "Time Series Processor", although it is also commonly used with cross section and panel data. The program was initially developed by Robert Hall during his graduate studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1960s. The company behind the program is TSP International which was founded in 1978 by Bronwyn H. Hall, Robert Hall's wife. After their divorce in April 1983, the asset of TSP was split into two versions, and subsequently the two versions have diverged in terms of interface and types of subroutines included. One version is TSP, still developed by TSP International. The other version, initially named MicroTSP, is now named EViews, developed by Quantitative Micro Software.
A file format is a standard way that information is encoded for storage in a computer file. It specifies how bits are used to encode information in a digital storage medium. File formats may be either proprietary or free and may be either unpublished or open.
In computational fluid dynamics, the PLOT3D file format is a standard file format used for storing grid and results data. PLOT3D was created by NASA Ames Research Center in 1982 by Pieter Buning and remains an often used file format. It can only store a structured grid. The structured grid allows random access, that is by knowing the block number, i location, j location, and k location, any grid point value or result value may be extracted. Additionally, given the location of any value, the block number, i location, j location, and k location may be determined. This makes it simple to iterate through a series of volumetric elements and calculate all required properties for the purpose of a CFD analysis.
LIMDEP is an econometric and statistical software package with a variety of estimation tools. In addition to the core econometric tools for analysis of cross sections and time series, LIMDEP supports methods for panel data analysis, frontier and efficiency estimation and discrete choice modeling. The package also provides a programming language to allow the user to specify, estimate and analyze models that are not contained in the built in menus of model forms.
