[Gretl-users] Authoring a contributed function package: your winter corona break project?

Hi everybody, we have close to 150 contributed function packages that can be downloaded from within gretl. For the list see either on the web http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/gretl/cgi-bin/gretldata.cgi?opt=SHOW_FUNCS, or from the gretl menus choose File/Function packages/On server... For those who don't know it yet, such packages are written in the Hansl scripting language, which is quite easy and intuitive but has become very powerful over the years. It mainly supports a functional programming paradigm, it is not object-oriented for example. For more information about the language see the "Hansl primer" PDF document under gretl's Help menu. Now if you're sitting in a place of the world where the pandemic is not under control (for example Europe or the Americas) and are getting bored from all this working-from-home and everything being closed, why not implement some missing econometric feature in the form of such a function package? Of course there's a learning curve involved, but in principle it is not very difficult. We have an official Gretl Function Package Guide also in PDF format under the Help menu. And last year Stefano contributed another very nice step-by-step tutorial: http://gretl.sourceforge.net/gfnguide/gfn_for_dummies.html (If you know of more resources like that one, please share them here!) For any further questions just use this mailing list, especially if the answer is likely to be of general interest. Apart from that you could also ask some packaging-related questions to the team of package moderators if you prefer to not discuss it in public; apart from the gretl heroes Allin and Jack the moderation team consists of Artur Tarassow and myself. (Please grab our email addresses from previous mailing list postings, I don't want to repeat them here inline. And please only function packaging-related questions off-list, no other general gretl topics.) As a final remark, for a first function package I would suggest to keep it simple and not aim for something overly complex. A package can always be upgraded later (they also have version numbers). An example of a very small function package is "criteria" from Allin himself, which basically just has 18 lines of code. But a package also shouldn't get much smaller than that :-) cheers sven