Re: [Gretl-devel] Sugestion: new function called varnames

On Sep 2, 2014, at 5:54 PM, "Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti" <r.lucchetti(a)univpm.it&gt; wrote: > On Tue, 5 Aug 2014, Allin Cottrell wrote: > >> On Mon, 4 Aug 2014, Logan Kelly wrote: >> >> Quick suggestion. Could a function called varnames() be added that is >> like varname() except it returns an array with the names of variables in >> a list. For example: > > varname() already does that, except that since it predates string arrays > what it returns when given a list argument is a single string containing > the names of the member series separated by commas. If we're serious on arrays (as I think we should be), we should have all functions with similar purposes return arrays. Clearly, this introduces the issue of backward compatibility. Would you consider it useful to have a function turning a space (or comma, ot tab, or whatever) separated string into a string array? This way, you could preserve backward compatibility for old scripts but also enjoy the power and flexibility of array, as in <hansl> list X = a b c string moo = varname(X) strings boo = strtoarr(moo, ",") </hansl> in (what I hope is) obvious notation. ------------------------------------------------------- Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche e Sociali (DiSES) Università Politecnica delle Marche (formerly known as Università di Ancona) r.lucchetti(a)univpm.it http://www2.econ.univpm.it/servizi/hpp/lucchetti ------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ Gretl-devel mailing list Gretl-devel(a)lists.wfu.edu http://lists.wfu.edu/mailman/listinfo/gretl-devel