[Gretl-devel] Re: ui-maker and missing warning messages
On Mon, Feb 16, 2026 at 5:13 AM Sven Schreiber
<sven.schreiber(a)fu-berlin.de> wrote:
Am 16.02.2026 um 11:00 schrieb Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti:
> On 16/02/2026 10:53, Sven Schreiber wrote:
>> Good morning,
>>
>> this is again about authoring a function package and using ui-maker.
>> Take conditional sensitivity, for example. I'm often making the
>> mistake that I don't use a string there, i.e. I don't put the name of
>> the argument in quotes. Example: _(depends=hey) instead of
>> _(depends="hey").
>>
>> When building the package (via gretlcli -m), gretl doesn't complain
>> about this, it just doesn't work (understandably). It would be
>> helpful if gretl complained if the type is wrong in this context,
>> i.e. not a string.
> Well, the variable "hey" could well be a string, in the context of the
> ui-maker function, containing the value "hey". Just sayin'
>
But in the context of _(depends=hey) in the ui-maker function, the
unquoted symbol 'hey' is undefined. (It's an argument in a different
function.) In that sense it's even weirder that there's no error message.
I think Jack's point stands. In your ui-maker 'hey' is undefined, but
it _could_ be defined: for instance, one might make the dependency
parameter string conditional on some feature of the dataset.
Allin