Re: [Gretl-devel] trivial syntax request for "set"
On Fri, 13 Jan 2017, Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti wrote:
On Fri, 13 Jan 2017, Allin Cottrell wrote:
> On Fri, 13 Jan 2017, Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti wrote:
>
>> On Fri, 13 Jan 2017, Allin Cottrell wrote:
>>
>>> On Fri, 13 Jan 2017, Sven Schreiber wrote:
>>>
>>>> Hi,
>>>> would it be too difficult (or have unwanted side effects) to enable
>>>> several 'set' instructions on a single line, as in:
>>>> "set echo off, messages off" ?
>>
>> A less general point: do you ever, ever, leave "messages" and
"echo" in
>> different states? I, personally, don't.
>
> Hmm, No, probably not.
>
>> Actually, for anything exceeding 10 lines, my first 2 are routinely
>> devoted to turning both off. On the other hand, it's clearly nice to have
>> them both on when teaching.
>>
>> Perhaps (bar the obvious backward compatibility problem) we could
>> reformulate this via something like
>>
>> set verbose [on | off | echo | messages ]
>>
>> defaulting to "off" if possible.
>
> The minimal, backward-compatible change here -- and I quite like the idea
> -- would be to enable
>
> set verbose off | on
Ok; but then suppose echo is off and messages is on (or viceversa); what's
the state of "verbose"? Unless we have a third libset variable, which makes
everything even more counterintuitive.
Jack, I took your hypothesis to be that echo and messages would
pretty much always be in the same state. But OK, suppose they're
not: does that matter? We could print "on" for verbose if either of
the two existing settings are active (this is relevant only when a
user does "set" with no arguments to inspect the state). Regardless,
"set verbose off" would turn off both (or "on" turn on both). In my
notion there would be a third libset string, but no third variable
as such.
And besides: we still have the still undocumented SET_ECHO_SPACE
feature (I
have to admit I have no idea as to what its purpose is meant to be ;) )
Ah, well ;-) That's something I found quite useful at one point,
but I guess it's high time to "document or delete". What it means
is that vertical white space in the input is preserved in the
output. So you can visually separate chunks of output without having
to insert empty 'print ""' statements or extra newlines in printf.
Allin