Some thoughts about the future of gretl: Gretl is a great software, but to continue to be developed into a fully featured statistical/econometrics software it needs to get more developers involved. There are two ways that gretl’s functionality can be extended: By attracting new developers with C programming skills, or by user written add-on packages/functions. While more C programmers are of course much welcome and needed, and will sooner or later arrive, I think that the largest potential for extending gretl’s functionality is user written add-on packages/functions. This is what has made LaTeX and R so large and widely used: The hundreds of user written add-on packages. Gretl currently has some basic support for user written add-on functions, but to be fully functional I think this need to be improved slightly. This is a work that I think will payoff fast. I think the following three features of gretl’s support for user written functions need to be improved: 1. First, there is a need for a possibility to pack several functions together in one package, in the way one can do in R. In gretl, I think this could be implemented like when loading a function now, but instead of the function appearing directly a dailog box appears where the user can choose which of the functions in the package to use. 2. Secondly, the layout of the GUI produced by gretl for user written functions needs to be improved. In particular, the function should provide a string attached to each function parameter, with this string appearing in the GUI instead of the function variable name and type, which currently appear in the GUI window. For example, for the function JB the function call could be something like function JB (series tmp “Variable to be tested”, scalar No_coef_in_OLS “Number of coefficients in OLS”) producing a GUI according to the attached screenshot, instead of the current (See attached file: suggested function dialog.JPG) function JB (series tmp, scalar No_coef_in_OLS) in the other attached screenshot. (See attached file: current function dialog.jpg) It is easier for a user of the function to understand ”Number of coefficients in OLS” than “No_coef_in_OLS”. And it looks much nicer. This would be especially useful for boolean parameters, when one wants to have a rather long sentence, like “Assume standard deviation is population value” instead of writing “Stddevispopval” as one has to do now. 3. Thirdly, a new input parameter type that is needed but is not available right now: A parameter type “select” where e.g. function foo(select variable_type “Variable type” [nominal “Nominal scale”, ordinal “Ordinal scale”, interval “Interval scale”, ratio “Ratio scale”]) would produce a drop down list where the user can select one of the variable types “Nominal scale”, “Ordinal scale”, “Interval scale” or “Ratio scale”. In the internal function code then the function programmer can add something like if variable_type = nominal do stuff elif variable_type = ordinal do other stuff … endif Best regards and thanks for a great software, Andreas