Re: [Gretl-devel] some bugs and issues

On Thu, 26 Jan 2012, Talha Yalta wrote: It's true that in some GUI contexts (contexts that do not have a script counterpart) we attempt to recognize the decimal comma on input, in locales where this applies. It's also true that this introduces a degree of inconsistency, since, as you say, the decimal comma is never accepted in a "genr" dialog. The rigorous way to fix the inconsistency would be to insist on '.' as the decimal character in _all_ input contexts. Perhaps we should consider that option. You suggest that gretl might automatically fix up the decimal comma in GUI "genr" contexts (meaning that the actual string passed to genr, and recorded in the command log, would use the decimal point). That could be done, but only at a basic heuristic level. The comma is the argument separator for functions, and also the row/column separator in matrix-range specifications. To make sure we don't break user input that's already correct, we'd have to do something like this: * Never touch commas that appear between '(' and ')', or between '[' and ']', in case we're in a function call or a matrix range. * Otherwise substitute '.' for ',' if the comma is followed by a digit. This to be confined to GUI dialog input (we'd never mess with scripts or console input) and the case where the output decimal separator is the comma. I'm not recommending this, just seeing what people think. Allin