Re: [Gretl-devel] functions vs commands (was Re: Octave support)
On Thu, 25 Feb 2010, Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti wrote:
The gretl scripting language has grown through time
considerably: the lack of coherence, if you will, is a
consequence of the fact that it had started more as a
convenience "batch" language to automate certain jobs, and
gradually has become more and more similar to a programming
language. Of course, since Allin and (to a much lesser extent)
I were the people who put the features in, IMO it's only natural
that the closer you come to a programming language proper, the
more it looks like the programming language that we like the
most (ie C), where _literally everything_ is a function.
Yes, exactly. But as we make gretl-script more C-like at the
margin, I'm very much aware that while this is to my liking it is
not very attractive to people with no programming background.
We could achieve consistency by scrapping "commands" and making
everything a function, but I wouldn't favor that (and I don't
think Jack is suggesting it). The "command" mode is more relaxed
and less persnickety (less need for commas and parentheses and
such syntactical apparatus; more flexibility in the order of
arguments -- e.g. option flags can go anywhere).
My feeling is that if we were to redesign it from scratch, the
scripting language would be quite different...
Agreed. I'm not sure exactly how it would differ (in that I like
having "commands" available), but surely it would.
Allin.