Re: [Gretl-devel] some function suggestions/questions

On Wed, 29 Jul 2009, Sven Schreiber wrote: > Allin Cottrell schrieb: >> On Mon, 20 Jul 2009, Sven Schreiber wrote: >> >>> in light of the recent discussion concerning mreverse() --for example we >>> don't want too many different functions for doing similar things-- I >>> would like to raise the following issues: >>> >>> 1) sort() and dsort(); IMHO it would be good to unify them into one >>> function with an optional argument to specify descending sorting, like so: >>> sort(a) or sort(a,0) : sorts ascending >>> sort(a,1): sorts descending >> Maybe so. My only misgiving is that I prefer not to use magic >> numbers (or magic booleans) as function arguments -- though we >> already do this to some extent. > I can understand both points of view, but what's the priority then? I > tend to think that if sort() and dsort() are better than magic booleans, > then the recently introduced mreverse(a) and mreverse(a,1) should also > be replaced by rowreverse() and colreverse(). Don't know what other > functions have similar issues. Having a mixture of "philosophies" with > respect to function signatures is unnecessarily confusing IMHO. You're right on that. I'll have to take a look at what we have in place and take stock.