[Gretl-devel] C-isms in hansl

Hi, this is a quite fundamental remark I guess, but at the same time perhaps doesn't affect too many concrete things. I think that hansl still might resemble C too much in some aspects, and the only real reason that I can see is that the gretl founders come from the C background. * The "printf" command: For newcomers something like 'printf "hi: %s, %d", s1, d1' must look horrible. In other languages including even Ox or --I believe-- C++ it is possible to write things in the natural ordering, so in hansl this would become something like: 'print "hi: " ~ s1 ~ d1' Of course, for more finetuned control the current printf possibilities would still be needed, but for many cases a default formatting of numbers would be enough I think. * Function names like "strstr": Tastes will vary here, but when we discussed whether or not the name of the function was intuitive for what it does, the only real argument was that it's just the C name. But IMHO for the hansl user it should be irrelevant whether gretl in the background is implemented in C or whatever other language. Probably there are more examples, but I guess the "printf" thing is the most glaring one from a user's point of view. Happy to hear your thoughts, Sven