Re: [Gretl-devel] some function suggestions/questions

On Fri, 31 Jul 2009, Sven Schreiber wrote:

> Some more detailed comments/replies about the pergm() issue: > Just having fft() was a long way from the spectrum from a user's point > of view, sorry. Oh yeah? <script> nulldata 20 x = normal() a = pergm(x) hN = $nobs/2 b = pi/hN*(seq(1,hN)') ~ sumr(fft({x}).^2)[2:hN+1]/($nobs*2*pi) print a print b </script>

> A closing remark, slightly exaggerated, so no offense please: if you're > "not overly enthusiastic of functions that do everything for you", how > do you advocate gretl to the public? You should recommend using Fortran > directly with Lapack or something like that ;-) The trouble with functions that try to do everything is that they're hell to write, hell to maintain and most importantly, hell to use, since you invariably forget what goes where. One of the reasons why I'm not overly fond of R is that, for precisely this reason, either you use R all the time and you have exceptional memory or you end up spending 10% of your time coding and the remaining 90% browsing the documentation or googling for stuff. But maybe it's just me.