Slightly off-topic, but maybe we need a fully standardized and unambiguous CSV dialect with its own file extension. Or maybe just use SQLite tables or Parquet?

Some things I dislike about CSV:

* No distinction between categorical data and strings. R thinks your strings are categories, and Pandas thinks your categories are strings.

* I'm not a fan of the empty field. Pandas thinks it's a floating point NaN, while R doesn't. So is it a NaN? Is it an empty string? Does it mean Not Applicable? Does it mean Don't Know? Maybe it should be removed altogether.

* No agreement about escape characters.

* No agreement about separator characters.

* No agreement about line endings.

* No agreement about encoding. Is it ASCII, or UTF-8, or UTF-16, or Latin-whatever?

* None of the choices above are made explicit in the file itself. They all have the same extension "CSV".

These use up a bit of time whenever I get a CSV from a colleague, or even when I change operating system. Sometimes I end up clobbering the file itself.

Good things: * Human readable. * Simple.

I think the addition of some rules, and a standard interpretation of them, could go some way to improving the format.