On Wed, 27 Nov 2013, Sven Schreiber wrote:
Hi,
out of curiosity: what is still on the general to-do list for gretl 2.0?
I'm not talking about a wishlist for incremental features which will
always contain some items and will be added in point releases, but the
big picture -- I've heard there's ongoing work about multiprocessing
support, but apart from that I cannot think of anything fundamental that
is really missing, or is there?
Nice timing. Allin and I are, while I'm writing this, in the same room, so
I can speak for both. (In Edinburgh, if you're curious.)
There are many things that would have to be said in response to your
messsage; for example: yes, we're actively working on making it possible
to drive a massively multicore beast from hansl. The reason why I'm being
vague on this is that we're not yet sure of what the best way is to make
parallel cpus (if available on the hardware) available to the gretl user,
either through hansl or through the pre-canned procedures, so forgive me
if I'm scant on details.
The point you raise about accessing user-written procedures via generic
syntax constructs, such as "dash-dash" options is interesting, and I think
could be suitably generalised by saying (like you hint at by the end of
your message) "It'd be nice to have a syntax like stata has, where you can
call user-written stuff in a way that's sytactically undistinguishable
from in-built constructs". I personally agree that this is a goal well
worth pursuing.
Again: I won't go into details on this, but one of the things we plan to
do this week is to start working on a complete Backus-Naur representation
of hansl (that we don't have at the moment). Apart from making it possible
to re-implement a number of things more efficiently, it should give us a
much clearer idea on how to modify hansl for 2.0: what to add, what to
deprecate, what to modify, etcetera. Once you have hansl in Backus-Naur
form what you're suggesting should be feasible.
-------------------------------------------------------
Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti
Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche e Sociali (DiSES)
Università Politecnica delle Marche
(formerly known as Università di Ancona)
r.lucchetti(a)univpm.it
http://www2.econ.univpm.it/servizi/hpp/lucchetti
-------------------------------------------------------