I’d like to suggest adopting a unique extension for NetLogo open source files. Currently, these files use the .nls extension, which is also used by unrelated file types. This overlap makes it difficult for tools like linguist and other language detection systems to correctly identify NetLogo code (see this PR for context).
With NetLogo 7 introducing .nlogox and .nlogox3d, this might be a good opportunity to introduce a more distinctive extension—perhaps something like .nlogoxsf.
We’re open to changing the file extension, but I don’t want to try to squeeze that into NetLogo 7.0. I’ve made a ticket for this on GitHub, targeting 7.1.
I don’t have strong feelings about .nlsx. It has the advantages of being very similar to our previous extension and of seemingly not being in use by anyone. But the x in .nlogox stands for XML (in the same vein as .docx), which wouldn’t be factually correct of .nls files as they are today, and I’m not certain that they should change to become XML. I’d think not, but maybe some advantage of that would become more clear as the module system implementation gets further refined and tested…?
Either way, we’ll continue to support reading the old .nls extension, but we’ll output (and encourage people to use) whatever the new extension is that we settle on.