On Wed, 24 May 2017, Sven Schreiber wrote: I created a trivial gfn that produces a matrix with a NaN in it, then ran a script that calls it, as follows: include ./warntest.gfn nulldata 10 set verbose off matrix M = myfun() print M In this case I saw the message In regard to function myfun (package warntest): Warning: generated non-finite values However, if I inserted "set warnings off" in the caller that suppressed the message. So I'm not sure what's happening in your case. Could you perhaps send me a caller for johansensmall.gfn that provokes a warning? Allin

On Thu, 25 May 2017, Sven Schreiber wrote: A few comments on this. (I know that not all of the following will be news to Sven, but this is partly just for the record.) Not so long ago, we enabled the command "set verbose off", which combines the two commands (still OK individually) set echo off set messages off One point that transpires from the above is that "set verbose off" does _not_ turn off warnings. That seems to me defensible: "echo" (printing the input statements before the output) and "messages" (confirmatory output such as "Generated matrix m") can fairly be called verbose. But warnings are not just verbosity: they're telling the user that something has gone wrong, although it falls short of an outright error condition. Nonetheless, we support the command "set warnings off", for the benefit of users who know very well what they're doing and want to cut down on what they regard as unwanted noise. But this command is "top down". If you say "set warnings off" in a top-level ("main") script, that turns off warnings in any and all functions called by that script. But if you issue that same statement inside a function it applies _only_ inside the function. Consider the following hansl fragment: <hansl> set verbose off function matrix myfun (void) # set warnings off matrix m = {1, 0/0} return m end function nulldata 10 # set warnings off matrix M = myfun() </hansl> As it stands, this produces: <output> ? run warnfunc.inp /home/allin/stats/extra-gfn/mypkg/warnfunc.inp In regard to function myfun: Warning: generated non-finite values Warning: generated non-finite values </output> If you uncomment "set warnings off" inside myfun(), the output becomes: <output> ? run warnfunc.inp /home/allin/stats/extra-gfn/mypkg/warnfunc.inp Warning: generated non-finite values </output> Note that the first warning - the one issued inside myfun() -- has been suppressed, but we still get a warning when a matrix containing a "NaN" value is returned to the main script: the suppression of warnings applies only within the function. But if we uncomment the "warnings off" statement in the caller, then the warnings are fully suppressed. This may be debatable but it's by design. The idea is that if a function (a built-in function, a function in a gfn package or whatever) returns to the ultimate caller a matrix containing NaNs, the user should be given fair warning. Since NaNs propagate on matrix operations, failure to indicate their origin could quickly become quite confusing. If you want to say, in effect, "Look I know that the return value of this function can sometimes contain NaNs, but I can handle that, I don't want gretl to make a fuss", then OK, suppress warnings in the caller script. But if you want to say, "The return value of my function may sometimes contain NaNs but please don't bother the user about that: look, I'll put 'set warnings off' in my function code", then that won't work, and it's not supposed to work. So far as I can tell, there's no difference in this respect between function code packaged in a gfn file and function code in a regular script: the same rules apply. One difference is that in non-packaged code you could do: <hansl> set warnings off function matrix myfun (void) matrix m = {1, 0/0} return m end function nulldata 10 matrix M = myfun() </hansl> In the above, warrnings are set "off" globally (prior to both function code and main script). There's no way to do that from inside a function package, and IMO there shouldn't be. Allin