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

On Fri, 14 Dec 2007, Sven Schreiber wrote: 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 "../". "include" is meant for function files; what you're doing here is really a "run". But on the substantive point: "if" calls for evaluation of a condition, which invokes the "genr" apparatus. That apparatus assumes we have a data set in place, and will fail in nasty ways if we don't. 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. 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. Allin.