[Gretl-devel] some function suggestions/questions

[Allin Cottrell]

On Fri, 31 Jul 2009, Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti wrote:

> I'd like to voice my opinion on a few things:

Good ;-)

> 1) there are a few cases when a certain function may conceivably
> behave in either of two ways: sort up/down, reverse rows/cols
> etcetera. In all these cases, having a policy might be nice
> (although it could also be a little bureaucratic, but still).
> Possible policies are:
>
>  	a) two functions (sort()/dsort())
>  	b) one function with optional boolean switch (sort(a)/sort(a,1))
>  	c) one function with some userland tricks (sort(a)/-sort(-a))
>
> My personal ordering (best to worst) is b-c-a, but I'm open to change my
> mind.

I'm inclined to agree.  Shall we add the option to sort() and
mark dsort as deprecated, then before too long scrap dsort?

> I'd like to make one exception, though: I like ok() and
> missing() ...

Yup, me too.

> 2) pergm...

I don;t have strong feelings on this.  What you say makes sense to
me -- and I guess it correspons to the status quo in CVS?

> 3) makemask is nice to have IMO. Sometimes you need to convert a
> series to a matrix and then back to a series. If there are NAs
> in the original series, the matrix will have less rows than
> $nobs and "makemask"  helps to map it back to a series.

Ah, OK.

>
> 4) string functions: I don't have strong opinions on strcmp vs "==".
> strncmp is also fine by me. But what I'd really like to see is the
> equivalent of C scanf().

We have the sscanf command; I've now added a functionized version,
and also generalized it slightly by allowing the format to be a
string variable (before it had to be a string literal). We could
add plain scanf if that would be useful.

Allin.