[Gretl-devel] mread possible enhancement

I was fooling around with Octave and I realised we don't have (yet) an easy way to perform a task like they do in <matlab> a = load("x.csv") </matlab> which would read a csv file into a matrix; we do have mread(), but back in the day when we designed this function our inspiration was the .mat format used in Ox, in which the first line must hold the matrix dimensions. Of course we could achieve the desired effect by primitive functions such as readfile() etc, but it'd be long and tiresome. What do you think? Is this worthwhile having? And if so, should we extend the mread() syntax or have a new function? ------------------------------------------------------- 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 -------------------------------------------------------