[Gretl-devel] 'include' w/o 'open' -- new behavior

[Sven Schreiber]

Am 14.12.2007 16:34, Allin Cottrell schrieb:
>
> Up till now, the "./" notation for filenames has always just used 
> the actual current working directory, which is not necessarily the 
> same as "shelldir": the latter was used strictly for shell 
> commands, and gretl's "open", "include" and so on are not shell 
> commands.  However, this does seem unintuitive so I'm modifying 
> gretl's path searching: if shelldir is set, it will be checked 
> first when gretl is asked to open a filename that starts with "./" 
> or "../".
>
>   

Ah yes I vaguely remember all those directory issues when I was hacking 
around with py4gretl. I still find it confusing though; some day when I 
find the time I'll try to write down some documentation and possibly 
make suggestions for improvement...

>
> "include" is meant for function files; what you're doing here is 
> really a "run".  

'Run' and 'include' also keep confusing me. Is it correct that currently 
the differences between 'include' and 'run' are:

* include can also read in a matrix xml file
* run works inside functions, too

I may be missing something, but essentially I still don't understand why 
it's necessary --apart from historical reasons-- to have two separate 
commands that exist for executing script files. Couldn't they be merged?

> One way around this would be to do the equivalent of "open 
> nulldata 1" automatically on program startup.  This is worth 
> thinking about, but probably not for the 1.7.1 release.  I take 
> your point that we now have quite a lot of things you can 
> usefully do in gretl without having a dataset open.  Doing "open 
> nulldata" explicitly is not very high-cost, but perhaps it's a bit 
> clunky.
>   
Thanks for considering it, this is now feature request 1850969.
>
> C-style comments "/*" and "*/" make that pretty easy, but it might 
> be nice to have GUI commands "comment region" and "uncomment 
> region" in the script editor window.
>   

No sorry, that was a stupid question/comment of mine, especially since I 
have already used  "/*" and "*/" in gretl. No need to work on the editor 
in this area IMHO.

thanks,
sven