[Gretl-devel] test for equality vs assignment, function packages

This point has been the subject of discussion not so long ago (sorry, couldn't find the reference before timing out!). But here I take it up again. For a long time, the gretl documentation has stated that testing for equality should be done using "==" (two consecutive equals signs, as in most programming languages). But also for a long time, we have accepted a single equals sign for that purpose. The latter is now officially deprecated (see http://gretl.sourceforge.net/Backward.html ) because it makes it difficult to produce correct error messages in some cases (plus it's plain sloppy). And in current git you get a warning if gretl reckons you're using '=' for an equality test. Here's the problem: it turns out that several function packages use '=' for testing equality, in some cases within loops that may have many iterations. So if we keep the warning in place, and don't revise those packages, users may end up seeing a huge spew of warnings from packages that have been approved for public consumption -- which doesn't seem good. We could kick the can down the road by hushing the warning for the next release. We could identify the packages in question and request that their authors fix them. And/or we could fix the packages ourselves (if the authors are non-responsive). This raises a policy question. On a few previous occasions I have fixed up somebody else's package (when the author has apparently dropped out of circulation but the package seems to have some merit). But is this something we want to get into? Allin