Re: [Gretl-devel] ema, obs and optional parameter

> While I'm all for a cleanup along Ignacio's lines (and maybe more, as I > mentioned before), I'm also against script-breaking changes, as you > know. These changes seem to be quite disruptive. I agree. What we have at the moment is, in effect, "implicit obsnum() conversion" for syntactical elements that can be recognized unambiguously as candidates for such conversion. My suggestion would be: (a) re-word the manual (and rewrite any packaged scripts that use this implicit conversion) to use obsnum() explicitly, for the sake of clarity as Ignacio suggests, but (b) do not actually remove the implicit conversion, so that old scripts are not broken. (I'm not aware of any actual problems generated by the implicit conversion, other than a certain lack of clarity.)

> AFAIK there is a general idea floating around to have a release > at some point with a lot of backward incompatibilities, and of > course also a lot of cleanups. Jack started a wiki page about > it. Maybe it's time to make some concrete plans for gretl 2.0 or > whatever it will be called? Like for the next gretl conference, > or 02/02 next year... OK by me.