Dear all, during a recent exchange that I had with Oleh Komashko, the idea came up thet it'd be quite nice to have a short-hand function for printing out messages in scripts, in a standardised and recognisable form. So I wrote a little prototype in hansl, that you see below: <hansl> set verbose off function void message(string m, scalar l[60]) d = "-" lm = strlen(m) scalar k = lm + 8 > l ? l - 8 : lm s = "" if lm == 0 loop i=1..l --quiet s = s ~ d endloop else loop i=1..3 --quiet s = s ~ d endloop s = s ~ " " ~ m[1:k] ~ " " loop i=k+6..l --quiet s = s ~ d endloop endif printf "%s\n", s end function message("Ha") message("") message("A shorter one", 40) message("An inordinately long one, which should be truncated, really") </hansl> My question is: would it be a good idea to turn this into a native function? ------------------------------------------------------- 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 -------------------------------------------------------