The mysterious stack() function
by Sven Schreiber
Hi,
a colleague made me notice the stack() function for handling a specific
case of panel data import in section 4.5 of the guide. I must admit I
have never been aware of that function, and I have one or two questions
here.
First, it does not appear in the function index (Gretl Command Reference
/ Functions proper, or in the built-in function documentation). Is this
an oversight, or is there a deeper reason?
Secondly, it is well documented in the guide section 4.5, but it appears
to be a strange beast: It is not a gretl command (gets function
arguments in parentheses, for example), but there are double-dash
options such as --offset or --length. I don't remember to have seen
something like this in gretl (or hansl) before.
I guess the story here is some path dependence of the early days, but I
wonder if this area could be cleaned up somehow?
thanks,
sven
5 years, 10 months
trivial lags() bug
by Sven Schreiber
Hi,
leaving out the mandatory second arg to lags() doesn't give an error:
<hansl>
open denmark
list X = lags(4) # "works"
list X print # empty
</hansl>
I think it should.
thanks,
sven
6 years, 1 month
quiet option missing in tsls doc
by Sven Schreiber
Hi,
trivial notice, no --quiet option is given in the doc for tsls.
Also tobit?
probit?
poisson?
negbin?
logit?
logistic?
lad?
hsk?
gmm?
garch?
duration?
biprobit?
ar1?
ar?
(And the linking between arma and arima is somehow broken in the
builtin-ref it seems.)
thanks,
sven
6 years, 1 month
unitdum: link to nowhere in the guide
by Sven Schreiber
Hi,
in ch. 20 it says: "(See Chapter 9 for details on unitdum)." but there
is nothing there in ch. 9. This is the concrete buglet there.
More generally, the purpose of the (short) ch. 9 isn't very clear to me
-- I guess this is due to historical developments. It says it deals with
"special functions" and "some of the finer points".
But the following function explanations relating to lrvar() or cdf()
have nothing to do with genr. (Apart from the fact that in some sense
everything in gretl may have to do with genr.) They are just that: some
special functions like many others who don't appear there.
I guess it would be useful to collect the idiosyncratic genr stuff in
ch. 9 which represents the legacy:
- genr time (or genr index)
- genr unitdum
- genr timedum
- genr dummy
And move other stuff outside of ch. 9.
thanks,
sven
6 years, 1 month
package help text format (again)
by Sven Schreiber
Hi,
I'm about to put together a new function package soon, and so the issue
of the help text formatting is on the table again, at least for me.
Is there any kind of subset (common denominator) of markup rules that I
can use which will make it look "better" somehow, now or in the future?
Or is it still too early to tell?
thanks,
sven
6 years, 1 month
funny uncaught syntax error
by Sven Schreiber
Hi,
OK here's something a little embarassing, because there's a stupid
syntax mistake on my part. However, it's interesting that gretl didn't
complain about the syntax error, only afterwards:
<hansl-wrong>
loop i = 1 to 5 # of course wrong syntax, instead of 1..5
print i # complaint happens here
endloop
</hansl-wrong>
I wonder how gretl interpreted that "1 to 5" part...
thanks,
sven
6 years, 1 month
gretl 2018c and git
by Allin Cottrell
Here's a comment on the new gretl 2018c release, since the
discussion that led up to it took place off-list.
It's mostly a bug-fix release, initially driven by Jack's noticing a
bug in the (panel-related) pmean() and psd() functions: they would
produce wrong results if only the first observation of each
individual differed from the others (gretl then mistakenly supposing
that the series in question was time-invariant).
To make the release I rolled git back to 2018b status, fixed this
bug, and also cherry-picked some other minor, safe fixes and
enhancements from git master.
That means that master is still ahead of 2018c, the most noteworthy
innovations not in the release being the new internal definition of
"NA" and the replacement of the "install" command by a new "pkg"
command.
Allin
6 years, 2 months
