[Gretl-devel] @-based string substitution and 'foreign'

Hello again, I am trying to become a forward-looking/rational-expectations/precog bug reporter... Seriously, here is a worry that is inspired from a trick that Oleh used in one of his scripts with a 'foreign' block, but that hasn't actually produced any errors in real life, at least for me. AFAICS gretl currently applies string substitution with @-tagged unquoted strings everywhere in the script. So a defined string s="be" can be injected somewhere by writing @s. This feature can be used to transfer some string values from the gretl environment to the 'foreign' environment. However, this might become a problem when the @-character has another syntactic meaning in the foreign language. For example in Python it starts a so-called decorator. Theoretical example without practical meaning: <hansl> string p = "heyho" foreign language=Python @property def mypyfunc(...): ... end foreign </hansl> The way I see it, gretl would turn the decorator line "@property" into "heyhoroperty" which of course breaks the Python code. If that assessment is correct, not sure what the best solution would be. As I said, the behavior has been used intentionally by some. Comments welcome, Sven