Re: [Gretl-devel] some bugs and issues
On Fri, 27 Jan 2012, Berend Hasselman wrote:
I agree with Jack. No syntactical sloppiness, please.
As far as I am concerned, the only place where I would be
prepared to accept a locale dependent decimal point
character in GUI input is where a user can input pure
numbers only. Nowhere else.
I find myself in agreement with this. There are various places
in the gretl GUI where a dialog box (or similar) wants a plain
number, and for a long time we have accommodated numbers
entered using either '.' or (in the relevant locales) the
decimal comma. I don't propose to change this at present.
On the other hand, for the "genr" dialog (and the sample
restriction dialog, which invokes genr) I'm agree that we'd
not really be doing users a favor by providing a half-baked
"fix-up" mechanism for decimal commas.
What I've added in current CVS and snapshots is smarter
error-handling. So if you're using the decimal comma for
output in the gretl GUI, and you enter a "genr"-type formula
that has a syntax error in the form of a misplaced comma, you
should see not just "syntax error", but a new, specific
translatable message:
"Please note: the decimal character must be '.'\n"
"in this context"
That leaves the matter of the "plot a curve" dialog, where
we've historically been doing fix-up for the decimal comma.
There's a case for putting this in line with "genr", but I'm
not going to make a backward incompatible change right now.
Allin