On Fri, 14 Sep 2012, Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti wrote: As usual, a very nice compact piece of hansl script from Jack! I agree, to a point, with the "nice to have" judgment, but... There are two dualities in gretl/hansl that tend to run together (though admittedly they do not always do so). These are series/matrices and commands/functions That is, we have lots of commands that work on series (in some cases named lists of series) but do not take matrices as arguments. On the other hand we have lots of functions that work on matrices, and a fair number that will work on either series or suitably dimensioned matrices. My feeling is that modifying the "freq" _command_ to handle matrices would be a major disruption of the way gretl/hansl works: why, then, should not all gretl commands that currently require series arguments also work with matrices? [As an aside here, the linked series/matrix and command/function dualities in gretl are shared by several econometrics packages. We intend to discuss this sort of thing in the hansl manual, which hopefully will appear one day!] What I've said above is quite compatible with adding a freq() function that takes a vector (or series) argument. But then the question is: what should such a function do, exactly? Should it print stuff (if so, what?) and/or should it return some sort of matrix of results? This is not a rhetorical question (meaning: it's imponderable, it can't be done), it's a genuine question looking for a good answer. If a good answer is forthcoming I'd be happy to add a freq() function. Allin Cottrell