Re: [Gretl-devel] some function suggestions/questions
On Fri, 31 Jul 2009, Sven Schreiber wrote:
Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti schrieb:
> My personal ordering (best to worst) is b-c-a, but I'm open to change my
> mind. I'd like to make one exception, though: I like ok() and missing(),
> I use them both and scrapping one of the two would imply me having to go
> over quite a few scripts. Besides, something like ok(x, 1) yielding 1 if
> the corresponding observation is missing strikes me as bizarre to say
> the least.
Jack, this really sounds like your stated preference b-c-a and your
revealed preferences are not consistent. Apart from that, I agree w.r.t.
ok() and missing(). In general it seems the boolean switches are not so
popular after all...?
"Do I contradict myself?
Very well, then, I contradict myself;
(I am large --- I contain multitudes.)"
W. Whitman
Some more detailed comments/replies about the pergm() issue:
Just having fft() was a long way from the spectrum from a user's point
of view, sorry.
Oh yeah?
<script>
nulldata 20
x = normal()
a = pergm(x)
hN = $nobs/2
b = pi/hN*(seq(1,hN)') ~ sumr(fft({x}).^2)[2:hN+1]/($nobs*2*pi)
print a
print b
</script>
A closing remark, slightly exaggerated, so no offense please: if
you're
"not overly enthusiastic of functions that do everything for you", how
do you advocate gretl to the public? You should recommend using Fortran
directly with Lapack or something like that ;-)
The trouble with functions that try to do everything is that they're hell
to write, hell to maintain and most importantly, hell to use, since you
invariably forget what goes where. One of the reasons why I'm not overly
fond of R is that, for precisely this reason, either you use R all the
time and you have exceptional memory or you end up spending 10% of your
time coding and the remaining 90% browsing the documentation or googling
for stuff. But maybe it's just me.
Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti
Dipartimento di Economia
Università Politecnica delle Marche
r.lucchetti(a)univpm.it
http://www.econ.univpm.it/lucchetti