I'm not clear on your point here. I'd parse
the list immediately after -syntax- and before
doing any serious work.
I see two possibilities for unpaired name lists.
1. The user made a mistake.
2. The user is just throwing names at
your option with the conscious view that
one too many doesn't matter.
I'd be surprised at #2, but I can't rule
it out; more importantly, I wouldn't indulge
either possibility, as a program writer, and I
wouldn't want a program to indulge either, as a user.
Certainly, nothing like this is indulged in
-renvars-. For example, all supposedly existing names
must exist beforehand, and all supposedly new names
must be available beforehand. -renvars- does nothing
unless that is true.
Nick
[email protected]
Roger Newson
>
> At 16:28 26/02/04 +0000, Nick Cox wrote:
> >If that were my program I would throw the request
> >straight back at the user. I would never indulge
> >a list with an odd number of names.
> >
>
> The reason -parmest- and -parmby- don't throw the request
> back is that they
> are often used in programs which call an estimation command
> which takes a
> non-trivial amount of real time to converge. I would not want
> to throw away
> all that work just because the user has inadvertently
> specified an extra
> name to -rename()- . However, I would agree that an
> error-level diagnostic
> is the way to go if an odd number of names is given to a Syntax 2' of
> -rename-. (And possibly even for -descsave-.)
>
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