gretl for Windows
by Cottrell, Allin
My apologies if you get this message twice, but I wanted to give it
maximum exposure.
Short story: with the next release, 2024c, we plan to make substantial
changes to our 64-bit Windows build (though mostly they will not be
very visible to users) and we'd like to get as many people as possible
to give the new build a try in advance of the release (currently
slated for the week beginning October 21).
As of later today, the snapshot on sourceforge labeled
gretl_install-64.exe will be the NEW build. If anyone tries it, has a
problem, and wants to revert, a "traditional" snapshot will still be
available:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/gretl/files/snapshots/gretl_install-64-g...
What's changed in the new build?
* We now link against the "new" (starting with Windows 10) Microsoft C
library, known as the Universal C Run-Time or UCRT. This is mainly a
matter of future-proofing, but it may bring improved performance in
some respects.
* The graphical interface now uses version 3 of GTK (as opposed to
GTK2). The main reason for this change is that gretl should look
better on small high-resolution displays (as on laptops) when
App-scaling is in force in Windows.
* Many of the other third-party libraries on which gretl depends have
been updated.
* The cross-compiler with which we build gretl has been updated from
gcc 10.3.0 to gcc 14.2.0.
Allin Cottrell
1 day, 14 hours
translation questions
by Sven Schreiber
Hi,
while updating the German translation, I came across the following
unclear (to me) items:
- actually, a typo in the English original: "Save return value
(optional, clear box for no assigment):" (missing n)
- "Byval" - what's the context, what does it mean? I checked the source
in lib/src/describe.d and I suspect it's about factorized descriptive
statistics, but I cannot replicate it in gretl's summary statistics.
- "factorized" - in gui/gretl.c in line 1914 it's the only string in
that area not capitalized, maybe it should be?
BTW, a note to fellow translators, maybe it's not clear to everybody
that now some strings are associated with the addons instead of core
gretl. I believe this is a new thing with this release. (Or maybe
already the one before?)
thanks
sven
1 day, 14 hours
xmin/xmax
by Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti
Long story short: for creating a series that contains the minimum
between x and y the shortest way we have is to use
<hansl>
series m = x < y ? x : y
</hansl>
which is nice, but I just realised that maybe some people would find it
more intuitive to use the xmin() function, as in "series m = xmin(x,
y)". The function, however, is at present scalar-only.
So I wrote a patch to extend xmin() and xmax() to series, matrices and
scalars, pretty much in the same way atan2() works. The patch is attached.
Comments are obviously welcome. If nobody stops me, I'll push the change
to git master tomorrow.
-------------------------------------------------------
Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti
Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche e Sociali (DiSES)
Università Politecnica delle Marche
(formerly known as Università di Ancona)
r.lucchetti(a)univpm.it
http://www2.econ.univpm.it/servizi/hpp/lucchetti
-------------------------------------------------------
3 days, 11 hours
ACF and documentation of Bartlett standard errors
by Sven Schreiber
Hi,
I think the choice of Bartlett standard errors for the correlogram in
the GUI is relatively recent (not sure), while the corresponding
--bartlett option for the corrgm command has been there for a long time.
In any case, I was made aware of the special null hypothesis underlying
the Bartlett variant: namely that for the interval at lag k the null
hypothesis is an MA(k-1). This is not a problem (of course), but the
standard confidence intervals come from white noise as the null
hypothesis. So the choice of Bartlett standard errors in this case isn't
just some robustification or small-sample thing (as opposed to a
Bartlett correction in other contexts, for example), but involves a
different view.
So far so good, but I haven't found any mention of what the Bartlett
errors actually mean. I have checked the GUI help text (for
"Correlogram"), the documentation of the corrgm command, and the user
guide. Actually, I was a bit surprised that the user guide and
specifically the univariate time series chapter does not mention the
ACF/PACF/correlogram at all. (Searching for "corrgm" or "ACF" doesn't
show anything, and "correlogram" only shows up in a different context as
cross-correlogram.) This is not a criticism, but just an observation --
maybe there are places I have overlooked.
I think wherever these Bartlett standard errors are mentioned as an
option, the different null hypothesis should be made explicit. I also
think it would be good to put the word "Bartlett" into the ACF plot if
it's chosen.
I'm posting this here for discussion, maybe I'm misunderstanding the
intention or assumption for those Bartlett standard errors, since I
haven't checked the source code (yet).
thanks
sven
6 days, 15 hours
Data labels in scatterplots
by Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti
Hi all,
this post is mainly after a request made to me by a colleague who needed
this in class to show something to her students.
It would be nice if it was possible to tweak a few details on the labels
one can put on a scatterplot via the "Data labels" interactive facility
that we have. In detail:
(a) at present, you don't get the option if the number of points is
geraater than 250 (gui/gpt_control.c, line 89).
(b) there's no way to adjust the font size, other than saving the plot
to the session and manually tweaking the gnuplot script.
As for (a), one may think 250 is more than enough, and I agree that in
general it is. However, consider the situation when you have a big blob
of points and 2 o 3 outliers far away from the rest. Surely, it would be
nice to be able to see who these guys are.
Perhaps we could have a libset variaable to handle this, or some other
machanism.
Of course, I'm not proposing to put this in for the next release, that's
just round the corner, but it would be nice to give it some thought for
the future.
-------------------------------------------------------
Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti
Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche e Sociali (DiSES)
Università Politecnica delle Marche
(formerly known as Università di Ancona)
r.lucchetti(a)univpm.it
http://www2.econ.univpm.it/servizi/hpp/lucchetti
-------------------------------------------------------
1 week
hint for building gretl without xdg-desktop stuff
by Sven Schreiber
Hi everybody,
this is just to share the solution to errors I got when building gretl
from source on a fairly minimal Linux distro inside the Windows
Subsystem for Linux (WSL), where no Linux desktop environment stuff was
installed: To avoid the error "xdg-desktop-menu: No writable system menu
directory found" at the stage of doing 'sudo make install', you just
need to go back to the 'configure' step and add the option
"--disable-xdg". I guess the same solution applies to other minimal
(console-only) Linux installations, not just on the WSL.
I guess you could also install a desktop environment in Linux instead,
but that seems a bit like overkill compared to the alternative.
(Note that I was still able to start the Linux gretl build in the
window-based graphical mode afterwards, not just the console program.
But that is probably a specialty of the WSL integration.)
Perhaps this is or will be useful for somebody out there.
cheers
sven
1 week, 2 days