Re: [Gretl-devel] scrap "halt_on_error" switch?
On Sat, 6 Jul 2013, Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti wrote:
On Sat, 6 Jul 2013, Allin Cottrell wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> I'm thinking that I'd like to get rid of option to do
>
> set halt_on_error off
>
> in gretl. But here's an opportunity to object if you are so
> moved.
[...]
> For (minimal) backward compatibility we could make it so that
> issuing the command "set halt_on_error off" does not itself
> provoke an error, but just prints something like "Warning:
> obsolete 'set' argument ignored".
We could opt for a more gradual course of action:
* first, we reverse the default option to 'off' and we issue a
warning about "halt_on_error" being a deprecated setting whenever
appropriate
* in a few months, we scrap it.
Thoughts?
Um, no, reversing the default is not good. We want gretl to
halt on error unless "catch" is used -- which is the current
default.
To explain just a little more, the reason I don't like the
ability to turn halt_on_error off is that it's likely to give
rise to cascades of (increasingly incomprehensible) errors. A
script writer should figure out if any commands might fail for
good reason and, if so, use "catch" on them -- and not just
tell gretl to keep going regardless of how messed up things
are.
Allin