Re: [Gretl-devel] beginner's (but understandable) problem on the console
On Mar 12, 2018, at 4:55 PM, Sven Schreiber <svetosch(a)gmx.net>
wrote:
Hi,
I'm relaying a usability issue report which I think could lead to improvements.
(This is not meant for the release in progress, but in general.)
First, if you type in an expression on the console, gretl will not automatically evaluate
it. Instead we have the 'eval' command. However, most interpreted programming
languages out there will directly spit out the result on what you type in at the prompt.
Why not gretl?
Or to put it more formally: I suggest that whenever gretl's parser cannot make sense
of the console input and would respond with an error message, it should try to
automatically prepend an 'eval' and see if that works.
If you mean being able to do something like (assuming m has been defined)
<console>
rows(m)
</console>
instead of
<console>
r = rows(m)
r
</console>
then I'd very much like to see this implemented (also for scripts if possible). Maybe
this just reflects my Matlab background, but it's always struck me as inefficient on
gretl's part.
FWIW,
PS
Sent from my iPad