[ESS] Gretl mode for ESS

[Vitalie Spinu]

  >> ahmadou dicko <dicko.ahmadou at gmail.com>
  >> on Mon, 1 Oct 2012 00:03:27 +0000 wrote:

  ad> Thank's a lot Vitalie for your quick reply.
  ad> I have never heard of gretl. How big is the community? And how does it
  >> compare to R, ox and eviews?
  >> 

  ad> Gretl is a software for econometric analysis ( also made by
  ad> econometrician ) but you can do some statistical analysis too
  ad> (even if I prefer R for that).

  ad> Nowaday, It's widely known among econometrician and it's viable
  ad> alternative to Stata and Eviews. 

Yes, I have looked into it a bit closer. It's a pretty mature
kit. Detailed manual of 330 pages and very easy to use GUI. Not to
mention a huge set of scripts and datasets for Ramanathan, R. (2002) and
Greene, W. H. (20xx). It is indeed very focused and pretty much
complementary to R in terms of time series.

Help system is good. It will be very easy to integrate with ESS
help. Argument completion and eldoc are also pretty straightforward as
their help pages are well structured and easy to scrap (though it would
be good to have an internal function to retrieve arguments and command
options directly).

Gretl has a pretty nice menu interface. I wonder if there is a way to
start a GUI dialog directly from gretl console. Would be nice to
automatically generate all gretl menus in emacs such that users familiar
with GUI can feel at home.

I am pretty convinced now that gretl would be a nice addition to ESS,
especially in the light of it being GNU licensed. 

    Vitalie


  ad> I think that R and Gretl can play nice together because Gretl is
  ad> really fast (really fast) and have some nice time series library
  ad> (I just started to write a R package to exchange easily data
  ad> between R and Gretl https://github.com/dickoa/gretlReadWrite)

  ad> Comparing to R and I think that the community is smaller but It
  ad> growing very fast (active mailing list, yearly
  ad> conference<http://www.gretlconference.org/>and some book about the
  ad> software).

  >> It's not that difficult to add a new interaction mode to ESS. The main
  >> problem is not with adding a mode, but rather with maintaining it
  >> latter on.
  >> 
  >> I can look into it, but not earlier than in a couple of months time.
  >> 

  ad> Great !!!

  >> You can look into it yourself. Sources for inspiration are
  >> ess-julia.el, which you probably should start with, and also
  >> ess-r-d.el for a more complete picture.  Once the editing mode is
  >> there, the main step is to construct ess-gretl-customize-alist with
  >> all the defaults needed for the interaction with the subprocess,
  >> and then write 'gretl function for starting a subprocess.
  >> 

  ad> Thank's a lot...ESS 12.09 is very nice and I already tried to play
  ad> with Julia (which is really interesting too). So, I'll look into
  ad> those files and try to understand how their works

  ad> Thank's again

  ad> On Sun, Sep 30, 2012 at 10:00 PM, Vitalie Spinu <spinuvit at gmail.com> wrote:

  >> >> ahmadou dicko <dicko.ahmadou at gmail.com>
  >> >> on Sun, 30 Sep 2012 13:04:40 +0000 wrote:
  >> 
  >> > Hi everyone,
  >> > I would like to know if adding a GRETL <http://gretl.sourceforge.net/>> mode
  >> > to ESS is planned ?
  >> 
  >> I have never heard of gretl. How big is the community? And how does it
  >> compare to R, ox and eviews?
  >> 
  >> > There's already a basic gretl
  >> > mode<
  >> http://fossies.org/unix/misc/gretl-1.9.9.tar.gz:a/gretl-1.9.9/utils/emacs/gretl.el> >inemacs
  >> > but it lacks several features availables in ESS R-mode (sending
  >> > command line, buffer, autocompletion, etc)
  >> 
  >> It's not that difficult to add a new interaction mode to ESS. The main
  >> problem is not with adding a mode, but rather with maintaining it latter
  >> on.
  >> 
  >> I can look into it, but not earlier than in a couple of months time.
  >> 
  >> > So my question is if it's not planned, where to start ? (I would like
  >> to
  >> > help even if my elisp programming skillz is weak)
  >> 
  >> You can look into it yourself. Sources for inspiration are ess-julia.el,
  >> which you probably should start with, and also ess-r-d.el for a more
  >> complete picture.  Once the editing mode is there, the main step is to
  >> construct ess-gretl-customize-alist with all the defaults needed for the
  >> interaction with the subprocess, and then write 'gretl function for
  >> starting
  >> a subprocess.
  >> 
  >> 
  >> Vitalie
  >>