[Gretl-devel] note on sprintf command

Hello all, This is something I've been vaguely aware of for a while, but now (as I'm working on cleaning up gretl's internal handling of user-defined variables) I've become acutely aware of it. The "sprintf" command in gretl has a deplorable sloppiness. If you do this <hansl> scalar x = 73 sprintf strvar "%g", x </hansl> gretl will not complain, and will create a string variable by the name of "strvar" holding the string "73". Further, if you do this <hansl> scalar x = 73 matrix strvar = I(3) sprintf strvar "%g", x </hansl> gretl will still not complain, and again will add a string variable called "strvar", which will never be seen since it is masked by a pre-existing matrix variable of the same name. Time for this madness to stop! It won't be fixed in the forthcoming 1.9.10 release, but it will be in 1.9.11: by that time, "sprintf" will expect its first argument to name a pre-existing string variable into which to write its output, and it will fail if there's no such variable. <hansl> # this is the right way! scalar x = 73 string strvar sprintf strvar "%g", x print strvar </hansl> Allin Cottrell