In current git and snapshots I've introduced a small amendment to the
rules governing variable names in hansl. (Reminder: all ASCII, starts
with a letter, contains nothing but letters, numerals and underscore;
max 31 characters.) The newly acceptable exception to the prior rule
is a single "math-greek" letter (in UTF-8), of which there are 24, for
use in naming all types of variables except series.
To make it easier to enter such characters there's a new facility in
the GUI script editor and console: Alt+letter gets you a Greek letter
(or Alt-Shift-letter for upper case). The Latin-Greek mapping is shown
below.
I'm not in favor of supporting arbitrary UTF-8 in variable names. That
would be complicated (given all the instances of fixed-format
printouts in gretl along with the fact that UTF-8 glyphs can take from
one to four bytes) and IMO would be of no real benefit. But I do like
the idea of being able to give parameters Greek-letter names (I'm
primarily thinking of scalars and matrices); and since all the Greek
letters in the math lexicon take two bytes, this is relatively easy to
handle.
Latin-Greek mapping (with Alt or Alt-Shift):
a alpha
b beta
c chi
d delta
e epsilon
f phi
g gamma
h eta
i iota
j psi
k kappa
l lambda
m mu
n nu
o omicron
p pi
q theta
r rho
s sigma
t tau
u upsilon
v nu (repeated)
w omega
x xi
y upsilon (repeated)
z zeta
Allin
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