[Gretl-users] obscure sampling problem fixed

We've recently fixed (in git and snapshots) a somewhat obscure problem with the "smpl" command in gretl. I say "obscure" because it's unlikely to affect most users, but here's the sort of thing that could go wrong. (1) You open or create a dataset. (2) You impose a sample restriction that selects a non-contiguous subset of observations. (3) You then call a hansl function, to which one or more series are passed as arguments, and in which "smpl" is used to modify the sample range. Now note that by gretl's design it should not be possible inside a function to modify the sample to include observations that were excluded at the level of the caller, as in step (2) above. The following anomalies could arise in certain cases: * Inside the function, when "smpl" is used more than once, on the second or subsequent use the sample range might end up including "excluded" observations. * Inside the function, a valid use of "smpl" might fail with the error message "No observations would be left" (i.e. gretl thinks the sample range would be empty when that's not the case). To our knowledge these points are now fixed, but if you have any scripts that match the pattern above, please check that the results look right. We want to make sure that we aren't missing any bad cases. Allin Cottrell