Re: [Gretl-devel] Attention State Space Modellers!
On Thu, 2 Jun 2016, Allin Cottrell wrote:
> OTOH, I can easily think of further goodies that gretl might get
in the
> future and which would make a different interface/approach even more
> convenient. (To be concrete, having named function arguments as opposed to
> only positional arguments would sure inspire changes for many packages.) Do
> we want to change the Kalman interface (or other stuff) again once that
> gets added to gretl?
There are no plans at present to introduce named function arguments.
Obviously I can't rule that out as a possible future development, but I don't
think it would be disruptive of interface design at the hansl level: I assume
that if we were to do that, we'd implement it as an "invisible" layer that
simply rearranges function arguments into the correct order, inserting
"nulls" or other default values for empty slots. I think that only the
user-documentation would need to be updated, and non-explicitly named
arguments would continue to work according to the current rules.
Besides, the systematic use of bundles makes the case for named arguments
much less compelling than it would have been otherwise. Define your
function with a bundle as argument and you're done. The difference with
named arguments becomes largely aesthetic.
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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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