[Gretl-devel] work in progress

[Riccardo Jack Lucchetti]

On Fri, August 25, 2006 03:11, Allin Cottrell wrote:

> While in Scotland in mid-August, I had some conversations with a
> friend who is experienced in writing compilers, and with some
> pointers from him, I think I can do a substantially better job
> with gretl's "genr" functionality.  I believe we can make genr
> more efficient, more robust, and more readily extensible, by
> using employing a more systematic approach to the parsing of
> user input.  So at present I'm working on that genr replacement.
> It won't be in 1.6.0 -- which I'd like to release as soon as all
> outstanding bug reports are handled -- but I hope it will be in
> 1.6.1.

This is very good. From the user's perspective, genr is ok now, but if you
look at the source, everything is very complicated. One thing I'd like to have
is a clean mechanism for defining functions with more than one argument. At
present we have fracdiff, whose code is quite messy, and pvalue, which also is
treated as a special case. It'd be very nice to have optional arguments, à la
R.


Riccardo "Jack" Lucchetti
Dipartimento di Economia
Facoltà di Economia "G. Fuà"
Ancona