Re: [Gretl-devel] C-isms in hansl

On Mon, 19 Sep 2016, Sven Schreiber wrote: Am 18.09.2016 um 23:35 schrieb Allin Cottrell: > >> On Sun, 18 Sep 2016, Sven Schreiber wrote: >> > > (Side remark: What _is_ confusing about string literals in hansl is >>> the way how literals are given without quotes in a foreach loop --as >>> in "loop foreach i peach pear plum"--, and probably in a few more >>> places; but I've said that before.) >>> >> >> Granted. There are some places in hansl syntax where we really require a >> string literal (or a set of same) but in the interest of (supposed) >> user-friendliness we accept an unquoted version of the argument. I'm >> prepared to admit that was probably a mistake ;-) >> > > And I'm willing to admit that maintaining too much backwards > compatibility in a relatively young language as hansl might backfire in > those cases... > Well, OK, we could revisit that. OK, but I'm not sure that people always know what's good for them! (See >> the US electorate's flirtation with Donald Trump.) The thing is, those >> dumbed-down printf variants might look quite nice at first -- say, if you >> have just one string and one variable to print -- but they don't take you >> far, and in the end you have to learn printf anyway. >> > > I must say I'm surprised to hear that and I don't agree at all. This is > the kind of argument that we usually hear against GUI programs and also > against syntax features like significant whitespace and so forth. Basically > most of the stuff that makes up gretl and hansl. > Having spent thousands of hours developing and maintaining the gretl GUI I'm not about to deprecate graphical interfaces. What we're talking about here is the relative merits of two command-line interfaces for printing information, when the exact content is not known at code-writing time. In my opinion the printf substitutes are inferior designs, and printf is not as hard to learn as many seem to think -- particularly in the context of hansl, where "%g" will do quite nicely for any numerical arguments, including "integers". (In C and other low-level languages one has a wide variety of numerical types that require their own specific conversions, and that gets more complicated.) But anyway ... 3) A new built-in str() function as in my previous post, that does > conversion to string with some default formatting (%d, %g), such that my > 'eval "hey: " ~ str(somenumber)' solution would work out of the box. > This seems to me the most acceptable of the alternative proposals, though personally I'm not convinced it's nicer or easier than printf "hey: %g\n", somenumber What do others think? Allin _______________________________________________ Gretl-devel mailing list Gretl-devel(a)lists.wfu.edu http://lists.wfu.edu/mailman/listinfo/gretl-devel