Re: [Gretl-devel] The mysterious stack() function

I agree it would be nice from the user's PoV if "join" could handle this case. However, my first reaction is that this sort of transposition and reshuffling is not in join's present repertoire and would induce a fair amount more complexity, plus it means adding at least three more options to a command that already has more than any other.

Just thinking out loud, but maybe we could have a pstack() function (a proper function) that does the business of transposing and reshaping the data, with "skip_missing" temporarily turned off. It could take two arguments: the integer number of individuals and an optional list argument (defaulting to the entire dataset), and would return a matrix with panelized variables in the columns. In itself that would leave the user with the task of extracting the series from the matrix. But maybe this pstack, or whatever we call it, could write out the transformed dataset as CSV (or gdt) so it could then be loaded easily -- either in addition to, or instead of, returning a matrix.