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