Am 10.09.2018 um 15:18 schrieb Allin Cottrell:
On Mon, 10 Sep 2018, Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti wrote:
On Mon, 10 Sep 2018, Allin Cottrell wrote:

I agree it would be nice from the user's PoV if "join" could handle this case. However, my first reaction is that this sort of transposition and reshuffling is not in join's present repertoire and would induce a fair amount more complexity, plus it means adding at least three more options to a command that already has more than any other.

I agree on this.

OK.

In itself that would leave the user with the task of extracting the series from the matrix. But maybe this pstack, or whatever we call it, could write out the transformed dataset as CSV (or gdt) so it could then be loaded easily -- either in addition to, or instead of, returning a matrix.

Thi doesn't have to be in libgretl. In fact, it could be part of the "extra" package, unless I'm missing something.

You're right. Here's proof-of-concept hansl prototype:

OK, as long as 'extra' is shipped with gretl (which it now is, IIRC) I think it would not be more difficult for the user to call this new function instead of applying the current solution.

function matrix pstack (int N, list L,
                        const string fname[null],
                        const strings vnames[null])
I guess I still have some thoughts and comments about the function signature and defaults and what kind of text file input arrangement is supported in detail, but I don't have time right now. Since it's pure hansl I'm happy to make concrete code proposals later.

thanks,
sven