[Gretl-devel] endX versus "end X" (was functions vs commands)
On Wed, 3 Mar 2010, Sven Schreiber wrote:
Allin Cottrell schrieb:
> On Wed, 3 Mar 2010, Sven Schreiber wrote:
>
> [Sorry, but I'll skip the > 1 quotation levels, since they get a
> bit confusing here.]
>
>> (I still don't buy the underlying argument, though...)
>
> I think you may have mistaken Jack's point. I took him to be
> saying that a "milestone release" that is mostly just backward
> incompatible changes is likely to please few people and annoy
> quite a number.
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.
Allin.