Hi,

when we perform tobit command with --guiet flag we sometimes get the following message: "Warning: couldn't improve criterion (gradient = 6.04477e-06)", which per se makes estimation not so quiet. So, the question is: shall we leave current behavior or make 'tobit --quiet' really quiet?

If the later, I wrote a simple patch which suppress any messages (attached). Another possibility would be adding '--silent' flag, which I could do either?

Personally I think that choosing "quiet" doesn't mean that I don't want to see warning messages, so the current behavior is OK. "silent" could be a possibility, but then I think we would have to do it for all estimators, not just for tobit out of coincidence. Right now I think the guideline is more or less that "silent" exists for tests and for system estimation (where even quiet prints a little bit of regular output).

I believe there's a workaround to really suppress all output: Wrap it in an "outfile" block:

string temp

outfile  --buffer=temp

tobit ...

outfile end

And simply discard the string. Admittedly not very elegant...

cheers

sven