Re: [Gretl-users] Replay on case-sensivity
On 18-04-2009, at 21:59, Allin Cottrell wrote:
Now to Berend's request that gretl should ignore case when
handling variable names. One point to be made here is that this
would be a backward-incompatible change, and a rather devastating
one: I know that it would break a _lot_ of the gretl scripts on my
system. That's not a killer argument for staying with the status
quo, but it means there has to be a rather compelling reason for
change.
Seems quite reasonable. If a lot of scripts would break, it is
probably better to leave things as they are.
As to the merits of case sensitivity vs. case insensitivity, I think
we should agree to disagree.
It depends on how you weigh the pros and the cons. And I prefer case
insensitivity.
Comment: Granted, this can be a (minor) inconvenience. But any
decent text editor has an option to adjust the case of selected
text, so for plain text data files this shouldn't really be an
issue. It _might_ be worth adding an option in gretl to convert
all variable names to lower case.
But what about .xls files? Excel, OO Calc.
If it is a one time only conversion, then it is feasible and not a
real chore.
But if you have to do conversions on 15 files all the time in your
editor or a spreadsheet program you will get annoyed very quickly.
The point is to convert all uppercase names to lower case.
Therefore a string function tolower (and possibly toupper) would be
very helpful so that you can do this
loop i=1..3660 --quiet
string oldname=varname($i)
string newname=tolower(oldname)
rename oldname newname
endloop
Berend