Re: [Gretl-devel] functions vs commands (was Re: Octave support)
Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti schrieb:
I'd be more ambitious.
We now have a number of ideas for backward-incompatible changes, the
most far-reaching being the abolition of "end if" and "end loop". If
we
have to break people's scripts, let's do it once and for all. My
proposal: release 1.9.0 advertising it as a preparation release for
2.0.0. The visible changes would be, apart from what is now in CVS, the
fact that we advertise in the loudest and most annoying way that the
syntax is about to change, via warnings, error messages, pop-up windows,
you name it.
I would also suggest to help users in the transition as much as
possible. This includes of course documenting the changes (but that is
being done nicely anyway), and a tool like Python's '2to3' which tries
to automate the transition from python 2.x to python 3.x as far as can
be done. I hope I'm not promising too much but I could volunteer to
write a Python script that would try to do that with the transition
gretl 1.x -> gretl 2.x. (Some parts would be easy, like replacing 'end
if' with 'endif' -- that's what you mean by "abolition",
right?-- but
other parts of course would be more difficult or even impossible.)
In the meantime, development continues as normal. When we reach the
following milestones:
- System GMM estimator for dynamic panel data (Blundell-Bond)
- At least EGARCH/GJR
- Bivariate probit / IV probit
which are IMO the main holes in our coverage, we release 2.0.0 with the
new syntax as well.
I think there is no reason to combine "feature milestones" with the
release of 2.0.0. IMHO this just makes it more difficult to communicate
to the users the backwards-incompatible changes. New features are being
added to gretl all the time (thanks to you!) with just regular minor
releases. Why change that now? So maybe those estimators will be ready
to be included in the 1.9.x series, or in the 2.0.x series, I think it
doesn't matter. (Since they are not coded in gretl script, the syntax
changes shouldn't affect them, right?)
cheers,
sven