Re: [Gretl-devel] some function suggestions/questions
On Fri, 31 Jul 2009, Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti wrote:
I'd like to voice my opinion on a few things:
Good ;-)
1) there are a few cases when a certain function may conceivably
behave in either of two ways: sort up/down, reverse rows/cols
etcetera. In all these cases, having a policy might be nice
(although it could also be a little bureaucratic, but still).
Possible policies are:
a) two functions (sort()/dsort())
b) one function with optional boolean switch (sort(a)/sort(a,1))
c) one function with some userland tricks (sort(a)/-sort(-a))
My personal ordering (best to worst) is b-c-a, but I'm open to change my
mind.
I'm inclined to agree. Shall we add the option to sort() and
mark dsort as deprecated, then before too long scrap dsort?
I'd like to make one exception, though: I like ok() and
missing() ...
Yup, me too.
2) pergm...
I don;t have strong feelings on this. What you say makes sense to
me -- and I guess it correspons to the status quo in CVS?
3) makemask is nice to have IMO. Sometimes you need to convert a
series to a matrix and then back to a series. If there are NAs
in the original series, the matrix will have less rows than
$nobs and "makemask" helps to map it back to a series.
Ah, OK.
4) string functions: I don't have strong opinions on strcmp vs "==".
strncmp is also fine by me. But what I'd really like to see is the
equivalent of C scanf().
We have the sscanf command; I've now added a functionized version,
and also generalized it slightly by allowing the format to be a
string variable (before it had to be a string literal). We could
add plain scanf if that would be useful.
Allin.