Talk:Data Interchange Format

message: I have added a bunch of technical information I found from Wotsit.
--KevinKor 20:38, 5 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Untitled

message: Done in July 2006 according to talk page history. Del♉sion23 (talk) 16:05, 23 January 2013 (UTC)
thread_title: Wikification

message: I'm not sure if this is any relation to Nav DIF, but if it is, maybe we should add a reference.  Info:  http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0CMN/is_n1_v22/ai_601504  66.191.19.217 14:43, 14 November 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Navy DIF 

message: Here is a little information to start. Since I was associated with the original project, I will not edit the main page.
DIF is a data interchange format developed by Software Arts, Inc. in the early 1980s (the developers of the VisiCalc program). The specification was included in many copies of VisiCalc and also published in Byte Magazine in article authored by people on behalf of Software Arts, including one of its employees. Bob Frankston developed the format, with input from others, including Mitch Kapor, who helped so that it could work with his VisiPlot program. (Mitch later went on to found Lotus and make Lotus 1-2-3 happen.) The specification was copyright 1981. If you find an old copy of VisiCalc you might find in the manual a copy of the spec. There is a lot of explanation there about what it was designed for, how to use it, etc.
As can be verified by the USPTO trademark database, DIF was a registered trademark of Software Arts Products Corp. (a legal name for Software Arts at the time).
--DanBricklin (talk) 20:40, 25 June 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  From One of the Developers 

message: Hey, I was working on a decoder for this, and it occurs to me the Wiki page could do with more details on the format as it took some working out.
For a start, It seems to work by starting at the top left and working right until a newline is encountered and the process continues until it reads EOD.
The pair of numbers that appear regularly seem to work by the first number being a command:
-1 : Newline
0  : Value, the second number is the value
1  : Everything normal, move onto next table entry
The second number seems to be a value, which is ignored if the first number is a -1 or 1.
The BOT command seems to be something to occupy space, while VECTORS and TUPLES seem to specify the table's width and height respectively.
The DIF file format seems relatively simple going by this, are there more details in it's specification that I'm missing?— Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.203.123.12 (talk) 12:22, 28 September 2009
: into its own section. I believe that, rather than , was the intention. I figured this was worth doing particularly since that comment is listed as one of the article's sources.--Mathieu ottawa (talk) 01:00, 28 April 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  More specification details? 

message: Although FILE FORMATS is mentioend in Data Interchange Format#Sources, MORE FILE FORMATS, which is thicker/larger, is not.
: The ISBNs are: 0-471-83671-0 (287 pages) and 0-471-85077-2 (369 pages).
: The subtitles for these are "FOR POPULAR PC SOFTWARE / A PROGRAMMERS REFERENCE."
 Nuts240 (talk) 22:58, 3 November 2022 (UTC)
thread_title: FILE FORMATS and MORE FILE FORMATS books (Jeff Walden)