Re: [Gretl-devel] endX versus "end X" (was functions vs commands)

On Wed, 3 Mar 2010, Sven Schreiber wrote:

> Sure; that's why I think help may be needed to ease the transition by > automating it as far as possible. BTW, I don't understand yet why it's > necessary to replace "end if", but I guess that's for another thread. OK, I'll hijack the current thread for that purpose! First, this is not a big deal. We incur a very small (but unsightly!) overhead in intercepting "end if" and "end loop" and converting them to the "correct" one-word versions. Why are the one-word versions correct? Here's my rationale: various blocks of instructions in gretl have a start and an end on distinct input lines (if, loop, mle, nls, gmm, restrict, system,...), but among these "if" and "loop" are special, in that they are all-purpose, nestable syntactical constructs. So I'm thinking that these particular constructs warrant a specific ending tag -- like "if" and "fi", "case" and "esac", "do" and "done" in bash. And indeed, the specific ending tags "endif" and "endloop" have been in the manual for ages; they are the primordial forms. But I'm aware that this is mostly an aesthetic issue -- conversion from the deprecated forms presumably takes a few nanoseconds at worst -- so this is not a point that I'd push very hard.