. In addition, I see that even the line with 'catch' does print out the error, whereas I expected it to be silent in that case, no?

BTW, it seems that sometimes it's silent, and sometimes not. After a fresh restart of gretl, I enter "catch matrix m = I(2,3,4)" in the console, and I see the message concerning "too many arguments". I can do this repeatedly, so it's not a matter of newly defining m, it seems.

Then I run a sample script from a function package, go back to the console, and execute "catch matrix m = I(2,3,4)" again - I silently get a new prompt.

To be clear, the silent behavior is what I'd expect when using catch, not the printed error message.

thanks

sven