> This feels very weird, or am I blind and missing something obvious? Careful: isnull() doesn't mean "isn't there": it means "it's there, and takes the value 'null'".

Am 07.01.2015 um 21:33 schrieb Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti: > On Wed, 7 Jan 2015, Sven Schreiber wrote: > >> >> Now I have the following debug code inside this function, and I report >> the output as comments: >> >> # should give 0, since 'thresh' exists in the function's scope: >> check = isnull(thresh) >> # but actually gives 1: >> print check >> # but in this very next line, 'thresh' is accepted (no error): >> string mys = argname(thresh) >> # and gives the correct passed argument's name "ave_inc_gr": >> print mys >> >> This feels very weird, or am I blind and missing something obvious? > > Careful: isnull() doesn't mean "isn't there": it means "it's there, and > takes the value 'null'". > Suppose you're right and 'thresh' has the value 'null', then why does argname(thresh) return (correctly) "ave_inc_gr"? And in reality I was trying to do something useful (of course!) with the series ave_inc_gr inside the function, and got the error "no such symbol" or "doesn't exist" or something like that. The isnull() thingy is just another test I did to pinpoint the problem. BTW, the doc about isnull() says the question is whether the arg "is the identifier for a currently defined object". This is not quite the definition that you gave.

Finally, I had used the function before, and it had worked ok. Of course I can never rule out 100% that something else hasn't changed, but I think there is a chance that this is new gretl behavior for some reason.

Am 08.01.2015 um 15:38 schrieb Allin Cottrell: > > It sounds as if there must be a bug in this area, but I can't > reproduce it in a simple case. For example the following works as > expected: Yes I had the same problem, not being able to construct a short self-contained example. Otherwise I would have sent it.