Re: [Gretl-devel] New function for retrieving data from BLS
On Mon, 21 Apr 2014, Henrique Andrade wrote:
By the way, I would like to express a long time idea: I think all of
us
believe Gretl is a very good and strong tool for econometric analysis, but
we have many "competitors". Because of that, I truly believe that enhancing
the capabilities to download free data sets (like Fred/Fed, BLS, Banco de
España, Yahho Finance, etc.) is a very attractive feature.
I agree on this.
So, I would like to suggest that these kind of features were
introduced as
native functions Gretl (not as packages).
No, I think this is a _perfect_ example of a case when packages are
preferable to native functions: native functions are faster and more
efficient than hansl code, but they're more difficult to maintain and the
manpower for doing so is the most scarce resource the project has as of
now (Allin, mostly, and myself). So native functions must be used only
when speed is an absolute must and the target is stable. Retrieving data
from public servers, on the contrary, is not a cpu-intensive activity, as
Logan pointed out earlier in the discussion: in most cases, the bottleneck
will be the TCP/IP connection. Moreover, it's a moving target: the apis
may change, some servers may stop working, some others may introduce
subtle differences, and so on. Ideally, for any data source for which it
may be desirable to have a gretl interface, we would need one or more
developers tracking that particular source and adapting the data retrieval
functions in the shortest time possible.
Particularly, I would like to contribute helping to put Brazilian
data
sets into Gretl (here in Brazil we have two very comprehensive economic
data sets: Ipeadata and Central Bank. I could try to contact these
providers to help us in that "mission".
All we need is a public API for downloading the data; then, it's just a
matter of writing the approporiate hansl code.
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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
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