On Thu, 21 Jun 2018, Allin Cottrell wrote: > On Thu, 21 Jun 2018, Sven Schreiber wrote: > >> It should be noted that the doc only talks about a string (literal) in >> double quotes. String variables came later in gretl I think. Then using >> --description=desc is ambiguous: Does the user mean the string variable >> with name desc, or a literal string with a sloppy use (without the double >> quotes)? >> >> So I don't think it's a bug, but I would also be OK to be strict about >> requiring the double quotes for literal strings. > > I think we probably should enforce the "double-quotes needed" rule for the > sake of clarity.
Actually that's not so easy. All option parameters are in the first instance treated as strings by the command-line parser and double-quotes are just needed to stick together strings with embedded spaces; they are stripped off before the string is stored. So I'm not going to attempt this restriction now. Going back a moment to Marcin's posting, it should be clear that string desc = "This is something about my foo series" setinfo foo3 --description=@desc is not going to work. After string substitution the second line reads setinfo foo3 --description=This is something about my foo series which is then read as setting a description of "This", followed by uninterpretable trailing junk. Allin
