Re: [Gretl-devel] revision of index loop?
On Mon, 13 Aug 2018, Sven Schreiber wrote:
Am 13.08.2018 um 23:09 schrieb Allin Cottrell:
> context, which is not what I'm (sorta) proposing. So maybe despite
> this useful information we're really back to square one: does the
> putative gain in transparency outweight the redundancy?
>
Actually (without wanting to bury your current proposal) I think where
hansl loops could shine in terms of being intuitive would be an
extension of the 'loop foreach' stuff. Imagine you could write
"loop foreach {1, 3, 5, 10}" and some accessor $index (or whatever)
would take these non-consecutive values. Or for some pre-defined array
(of strings, matrices...) arr you could write "loop foreach arr" (or if
you prefer: loop foreach i arr). That would be nice! Probably not so
easy to implement, though, I guess - sigh.
Worth thinking about, yes.
As for the idea I was floating, I hereby officially give it up!
Maybe, just maybe, it would have been nice if, back in the day, we
had gone with something like R (a simple loop going either up or
down). But we can't do that now on pain of serious backward
incompatibility, and that fact in itself suggests that there's some
virtue in a simple one-way loop -- provided it's supplemented by an
any-way-you-like loop, which we have.
Allin