website translations
by Allin Cottrell
Hassle, hassle! Sorry, but many of the translations of pages on the
gretl website at sourceforge lag the English versions by months
or years.
Some of the updates to the English pages are fairly trivial, but
some are quite substantive (e.g. revision of the pages relating to
gretl on OS X). Which raises the question of whether non-native
English speakers are better off looking at an up-to-date page in
English or an out-of-date page in their own language.
I'd be very glad to receive suggestions on the best way of keeping
the translations reasonably up to date.
As you know, the gretl web pages are in CVS. It's possible to set up
a notification email when certain parts of CVS change, but I think
that may be non-trivial to get right. I guess I could set up a sort
of website bulletin, such that every so often (say, every 3 months)
I send out an email noting pages that have changed "significantly".
But, given the number of other things I have to do, I'd prefer if
someone can suggest something else!
Allin Cottrell
12 years, 1 month
Strings not marked for translation
by Henrique Andrade
Dear Allin,
I found some strings that I think are not marked for translation:
1. "No such file or directory"
When open a non-existing file.
2. "Scale is at maximum"
In a Gnuplot graph:
Best regards,
Henrique Andrade*
*
12 years, 1 month
Chow and QLR tests
by Allin Cottrell
A user has pointed out to me that gretl's definition of the break
point in the Chow and QLR tests is not the majority definition. That
is, when we do a Chow test with "break at observation tau", the
dummies we create kick in at tau. This is certainly defensible, but
the more standard procedure is to make the dummies kick in at tau+1:
tau is then the last observation of regime 1 rather than the first
observation of regime 2.
I'm wondering if we should change this (and document it), or maybe
just document clearly what we do at present.
Any thoughts?
Allin
12 years, 1 month
Mac build
by Andreas Noack Jensen
I would like to be on CVS Gretl but I have failed in building Gretl on my
Mac with 10.8.2 (Mountain Lion). I am able to build Gretl on Ubuntu. Are
there any recent descriptions on how to build on Mac?
--
Andreas Noack Jensen
12 years, 1 month
Re. gretl too liberal with zero-length matrices
by Andreas Noack Jensen
I would like to support Sven's and Jack's views on this. It is really
convenient to work with matrices with zero columns or rows. I agree that
the number of rows should be same same for ~ and columns for |.
I think it would be a good thing if Gretl accepted zero dimension matrices
more generally. For example, letting zeros(5,0)*zeros(0,5) return a 5x5
zero matrix and mols(mnormal(10,2),zeros(10,0),&res) return a zeros(0,2)
matrix a overwrite res with the values from mnormal(10,2). It really works
well in Matlab. It would simplify my code enormously as I could remove many
if/else statements.
Best
Andreas Noack Jensen
12 years, 2 months
Operator precedence
by Allin Cottrell
A while back Sven requested an explicit account of the
precedence of the operators that gretl supports. I agree with
the suggestion Sven made at the time, that such a thing
belongs in the (not yet existent) hansl guide. For now,
however, I've added a chapter titled "Operators" to the Gretl
Command Reference. Comments welcome.
Allin
12 years, 2 months
increment and decrement operators
by Allin Cottrell
Hello all + season's greetings
Up till now gretl has supported only very limited usage of the
increment (++) and deccrement (--) operators. The only acceptable
usage has been in stand-alone expressions (e.g.)
j++ # shorthand for j = j + 1
j-- # shorthand for j = j - 1
for "j" the name of a user-defined scalar variable.
As of today's CVS I'm experimenting with fuller support for
something that is really quite handy in C and similar languages,
namely the ability to embed constructs such as "j++" and "j--" in
more or less arbitrary contexts. For example:
k = j++ # k = current value of j; then increment j
m[j++] = x # assign x to element j of m; increment j
x = foo(j--) # evaluate foo(j); decrement j
Two limitations: (1) only named scalars are supported in this way;
and (2) only the "postfix" variant is supported -- where the scalar
variable in question is incremented or decremented after its value
is taken, unlike C where you can also use "++j" and "--j" to
increment or decrement j before its value is taken.
If people can test this, that would be very helpful.
Since gretl also supports the "unary +" operator there's a
potential ambiguity over what "++" means. The expression
x++2
is equivalent to "x + (+2)" or just "x + 2". However, I believe
we're OK: contexts where "++" should be interpreted in this way can
be distinguished syntactically from contexts where "evaluate then
increment" is warranted. If anyone finds a case where they think
"++" (or "--") is being interpreted wrongly, please let me know.
FYI: it's in CVS but not yet in snapshots.
Allin Cottrell
12 years, 2 months
gretl on Mountain Lion
by Allin Cottrell
After hearing a lot about problems with installing gretl on OS
X 10.8 I managed to borrow a current MacBook Pro from a
student and have walked through the installation process
myself (the machine had no previous gretl installation and no
XQuartz or GTK).
It went fine, although some aspects of the operation were
potentially confusing (in particular the way that new disk
image windows open _behind_ the Safari window so it kind if
looks like nothing has happened unless you minimize the
browser).
Anyway, I wrote up some detailed blow-by-blow instructions,
which I'm attaching. If any Mac users have points to add or
correct, please let me know. Then I'll put the instructions on
the website in some form.
Allin
12 years, 2 months
Contributed function packages (gfn files)
by Allin Cottrell
Hello all,
I'm pleased to see that we have a large and expanding number
of contributed packages on the gretl server. Good work, guys!
If you're not a package author the rest of this mail may not
concern you but if you are an author, please read on.
I've been running various checks on the gfn files, (a) to
ensure that changes in gretl CVS haven't broken any of them
and (b) to check that the packages themselves are in working
order. I found a few small bugs in the packages (noted below)
but first let me emphasize a general point: a valid package
MUST contain a self-contained and functional sample script.
This is for the benefit of both the end user and the package
checker (me, at present): I need to be able to extract the
sample script from each package and run it "as is" to check
that the package actually works.
A problem with several packages on the server is that the
sample script is broken in some way. The most common breakage
is that the "open" command is used but no valid datafile name
is provided. The argument to "open" must be either (a) the
name of a file that's included in the gretl distribution or
(b) a valid URL of the form
http://server/path/file
that points to a file of a type that gretl can open. Case (a)
is preferable; case (b) is OK provided that the URL is likely
to remain stable. Also note that in case (a) a full path
should NOT be given (that's specific to your system), just the
plain name of the file, as in
open australia.gdt
Note that if you can't come up with suitable data input for
your sample script in either of the ways just mentioned, it's
OK to use the "nulldata" command and construct artificial
data. In that case you should include a "set seed" line so
that the output is reproducible.
Another problem with some packages is that the command to
"include" the gfn file is broken. This must always just give
the plain package name, as in
include mypackage.gfn
without any path stuff. And the include command should not be
duplicated.
Specifics on the packages:
When I found a trivial problem with a package, I fixed the gfn
file myself and uploaded the fixed version to the server. If
any of the following packages are yours, please sync your own
copy to the version that's on the server.
* clustered_ols.gfn : The function call in the sample script
didn't match the name of the function in the package.
* hetero.gfn : The line "include hetero.gfn" was duplicated.
* HIP.gfn : Wrong command "include ../HIP.gfn".
* SETAR.gfn : The "open" command was invalid (and there was
some unsupported use of @variables as arguments to printf).
For the following gfn files the sample script was invalid and
I wasn't in a position to fix it myself:
BVNormal.gfn
lmTest.gfn
MCO_Ridge.gfn
MVStatistic.gfn
Panelregression.gfn
Ttest.gfn
For the time being I'm moving these files out of the public
area on the server. If you have a package on this list, please
review it and see if you can come up with a working sample
script -- we'd like to get your package back on line!
If you need to grab a copy from the server, see
http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/gretl/cgi-bin/current_fnfiles/invalid/
Allin Cottrell
12 years, 2 months
CVS
by Marcin Błażejowski
Hi,
for 2 or 3 days I receive following message after trying to update CVS code:
----
cvs update: Updating .
cvs update: failed to create lock directory for `/cvsroot/gretl/gretl'
(/cvsroot/gretl/gretl/#cvs.lock): Permission denied
cvs update: failed to obtain dir lock in repository `/cvsroot/gretl/gretl'
cvs [update aborted]: read lock failed - giving up
----
But, downloading clean code works perfectly.
Regards,
Marcin
--
Marcin Błażejowski
GG: 203127
12 years, 2 months
