[Gretl-devel] string-valued series
Hi all,
I'm working with a panel dataset that includes a few string-valued series,
and I'm finding a few things annoying, so I'm sending this message to the
list with a two-fold purpose: (a) to hear you guys' opinions and see of
there's antything I'm missing and (b) as a reminder to myself to work on
these things as soon as possible.
- when you compute lags of a discrete variable, the "discrete" flag is not
propagated (I think it should); can anyone think of similar cases?
- similar to the above: lagging a string-valued variable does not preserve
labels. Example:
<hansl>
nulldata 6
setobs 1 1 --special-time-series
l = defarray("foo", "bar", "baz")
series x = ceil(uniform()*3)
stringify(x, l)
lags 1 x
print x x_1 -o
</hansl>
produces
<output>
x x_1
1 bar
2 baz 2
3 baz 3
4 foo 3
5 bar 1
6 bar 2
</output>
of course you can do "stringify(x_1, l)", but it's sort of annoying.
- printing out an array of strings requires a loop if it has more than 9
elements. In some cases, this is VERY inconvenient. I see two way to go
around this: either we introduce a "set" variable, which replaces the
hard-wired limit at 10 we have now (something like "set arrayprint 20") or
introduce an option to the print command ("--full" or similar). What do
you guys prefer?
-------------------------------------------------------
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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