Re: [Gretl-users] bug? with string substitution

On Mon, 18 Dec 2017, Sven Schreiber wrote: I agree, very nice. However, I don't think we need to get too worked up about the command-form of sprintf. Our internal "tokenizer" can quite happily convert it to the function form -- that's now in git. Moreover, on closer inspection I don't think it was the sprintf command that was responsible for the bad behavior in the script that Peter posted recently; rather it was a bug in the "progressive" loop code, which is now fixed. (By the way, the --progressive option to loops dates back to before gretl had matrices. Now that hansl is a lot more functional I'd be happy to get rid of --progressive; everything it does can be done quite easily using an ordinary loop plus matrices. But that would be seriously backward-incompatible so I won't push it.) Anyway, I've now purged the command-form of sprintf from the documentation, replacing the command-reference page with a pointer to the function-form. I think that's enough for now. We can issue a deprecation without requiring that it be changed any time soon in affected function packages: "shouldn't be used in newly written hansl code" would be sufficient so far as I'm concerned. The "=" versus "==" business was more pressing since the resulting ambiguity gave rise to a pretty much insoluble parsing problem in certain special cases. That's not an issue with sprintf command versus sprintf function. Allin