Gekko blog

This is the Gekko blog. Read about the development of Gekko, software- and architectural considerations, parsing & the development Gekko command language, and much more. The Gekko blog is maintained and written by Thomas Thomsen, current editor of the Gekko project.

How to think about sigils?

Gekko uses the ‘funny symbols’ (sigils) % and # to indicate scalars and collections (for instance lists), respectively. More about these in the previous post. But how to think about them? For instance, in Gekko 2.0, a scalar value is written like “VAL v = 100;”, not... read more

Funny % and # symbols (sigils)

What is a sigil? In Gekko, sigils are used to denote general variable types, for instance %x if it is a scalar (string/value/date), #x if it is a collection (list, matrix or map), and plain x if it is a timeseries. The use of # was inherited from AREMOS, but AREMOS... read more

Modernization

I know, it was indicated that this blog would be updated regularly, and that has not happened for a long time (about a year). In the first part of that year, a lot of time was devoted to improving the plotting/graphing capabilities of Gekko, so that a version 2.2.... read more

ANTLR experience

When starting up Gekko (nine years ago), I started up simply looking at input (user input, or command files) as text strings, trying to figure out the meaning character by character. Such an approach quickly gets extremely messy, because you need to try to match, for... read more

Choice of GUI (WPF)

GUI means graphical user interface, and Gekko can be divided into two parts: the engine (core modules), and the GUI. Gekko tries to avoid too much clicking and pointing, instead offering a well-functioning syntax. Some software packages allow all operations to be done... read more

Why C#.NET for Gekko?

Back in 2008, why was .NET for Windows, and in particular C#.NET, chosen as the software platform for Gekko? That’s a good question. It was not completely by hazard, and using something more cross-platform was thoroughly considered. But first the good points... read more

New Gekko blog

Welcome to the new Gekko blog. I (= Thomas Thomsen) am the editor of the Gekko project, and the intention here is to write on subjects related to Gekko — that is, news about Gekko, timeseries data management, modeling, software architecture, parsing &... read more