From: Leigh Dodds ldodds@ingenta.com

...

I sense that application developers who use Nexus are pretty happy with the format since is was a collaborative effort to begin with, and that the Nexus community would not see a great benefit in adopting a new data format. Anybody else have this impression?

Given this, and other similar comments on the list, I'd suggest that an additional requirement of any new format (if thats the way things go) is that it provides backwards-compatibility, as far as possible with other formats.

IMHO, this inter-compatibility of data sets is one of the Big Issues that needs to be addressed. I (initially) put all of my data into DELTA and then converted it to Nexus. The Nexus file has been heavily modified (and many of my character and state names truncated in the bargin). Until very recently, there was no way to take *this* file back into DELTA. But more than that; all of the continuous data in the original file (aka measurements) are now gone and will have to be added back into the DELTA data set by hand. :-(

Why not extend the current standards that if there are data types that their particular application doesn't recognize, they stay around -- just ignored. MacClade does that even with Nexus data (maybe the newest one doesn't); but if I save my file from within MacClade, if I want to run PAUP again, there are commands that I must reinter into the file because MacClade has removed them because it didn't understand them.

Susan Farmer sfarmer@goldsword.com Botany Department, University of Tennessee http://www.goldsword.com/sfarmer/Trillium