Of course it’s not that difficult :-) This issue would address only the laziest people (such as myself :-)). It would not bring any significant improvement. Mihai Allin Cottrell <cottrell(a)wfu.edu&gt; wrote: On Thu, 20 Jul 2006, Mihai Nica wrote: You're making sense, if you mean to request that transformations of variables could be written into a model specification. However, I would dispute that this is a "GUI" feature: it requires typing the model specification. The gretl GUI model dialog doesn't require (or allow) any typing of the model spec. Perhaps you might find the gretl console suits your needs better? (Or a script for that matter.) You can't at present put transformations into a model spec (other than lags or list-creating commands), but it's not much more bother to type genr z = log(x/p) ols y 0 z then to type ols y 0 log(x/p) is it? Also, in current gretl Alt-x brings up a command minibuffer, though this needs a little more work to make it fully functional. Allin Cottrell_______________________________________________ Gretl-users mailing list Gretl-users(a)ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/mailman/listinfo/gretl-users --------------------------------- See the all-new, redesigned Yahoo.com. Check it out.

On Fri, 21 Jul 2006, Talha Yalta wrote: I agree, this can be an issue. It raises a larger design question. When I was first setting up gretl's dialog boxes, I wondered: How far do you have to go in making everything "mousable"? To what extent can you just present the user with a text entry into which they have to type something? One of the first relevant examples I looked at was Eviews, and there I found lots of instances where there was no "mousability", just a text entry. At first I though, "Great, I don't have to spend ages designing a GUI, I'll just do this sort of thing." And the model specification dialog in early versions of gretl was based on a simple text entry. Since then, though, we've developed a long way in terms of making things do-able via the mouse. (The latest substantial step was a GUI lag selector in the model dialog, so that users don't have to "create" lags first, before invoking them as regressors.) So far as the GUI method is concerned, I think the lag selector is about as far as we can go. Imagine a model dialog where you could not only select lags, but for each regressor, select whether you wanted level, log, first difference... The complexity becomes totally unmanageable. Which brings us back to something like the Eviews dialog, with a text entry, but a powerful one which enables you to embed transformations into the list of regressors. To some extent (OK, a small extent) we have that in the current command-line model specification. For example: ols y 0 x time ols y 0 x x(-1) ols y 0 x(-1 to -3) ols y 0 dummify(z) where the trend, "time", the lags of x, and the dummy variables representing the values of the (discrete) variable z, did not pre-exist the command. It would not be very difficult to generalize this, and allow arbitrary transformations of variables to be specified as regressors. But, in the very nature of things, there's no real GUI for this sort of functionality. Is it, then, worth considering a bifurcation of the model specification dialog? A "user-friendly" option (which we have already) and an "expert" version (which sticks a vamped-up version of the current command-line model specification into a text-entry dialog box)? Allin.

On Sat, 22 Jul 2006, Riccardo Jack Lucchetti wrote: I'm not sure I disagree, but perhaps I wasn't clear enough: the idea I was floating was not a complexification of the current model dialog, but an option (under Tools/Preferences?) to use the current dialog or a "type your spec" dialog. Yes, pretty much. A possible half-way house would be a dialog where you get to select options by clicking (dependent on the sort of model chosen), but you type the actual spec. I'm not actually advocating this, just "positing" it. This is maybe a good point at which to advertise a newly created mailing list, info for which is at: http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/mailman/listinfo/gretl-devel The new list is for discussion among gretl developers. The rest of this posting really belongs there (and will go there in future), but for the meantime here goes... In my conception, variables created in the process of parsing a model specification would be marked as "automatic". They would remain in the data array (possibly subject to garbage collection) but would not be displayed in the main window. If and when they were invoked again, they would be checked for up-to-dateness and either reused or regenerated as the case may be. Allin.