Re: [Gretl-devel] update on gretl functions and lists

On Wed, 23 Jul 2008, Sven Schreiber wrote: > I see. But isn't it a bit incoherent (for lack of a better term) > to affect the outer scope when it comes to list members but not > when the list itself is involved? (By default, I mean.) IMHO it > would be more intuitive to have a similar default for all > arguments passed to a function. Maybe that would mean that > absence of 'const' would imply that the list itself could be > changed, instead of restoring the default. My (not perfectly comfortable) defence of the setup I describe above would run something like this: when you pass a plain series (not a series-pointer) to a function, the function can't modify the series at caller level. The same for matrices and so on. So lists should conform: you'd need a list-pointer to modify the list itself. But part of the idea of a list argument is that the member series are made accessible as such (without any copying of values). A list is a sort of "pointer to multiple series", which are therefore modifiable unless marked as const.