On Sat, 27 Feb 2021, Allin Cottrell wrote:

First reaction: I'd say this is a case for use of "catch" rather than having getinfo return an empty or bogus bundle. An on-the-fly series is just a raw array of doubles and it seems to me the only information gretl can provide about it is the numerical values. Well, I suppose we could get a rudimentary "description" by extracting the argument to getinfo itself as a string:

getinfo(log(sqft)) -> description: "log(sqft)"

But would that serve a purpose?

In fact, I guess it would. The use-case that prompted me to look into this is using getinfo() within a function, eg

<hansl>
function void foo(series x)
    b = getinfo(x)
    # do things
end function
</hansl>

To be more specific, I was using getinfo() to check whether the series in input had some sort of description. Clearly, if you call something like "foo(log(x))" the function breaks down. Like you say, I could use the "catch" modifier, but for my taste the catch/$error mechanism should be reserved for "true" errors (like eg trying to invert a singular matrix) rather than what we have here. In my view, the input series in this case has no meaningful metadata, but not's unreasonable to ask for it.

-------------------------------------------------------
  Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti
  Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche e Sociali (DiSES)

  Università Politecnica delle Marche
  (formerly known as Università di Ancona)

  r.lucche...@univpm.it
  http://www2.econ.univpm.it/servizi/hpp/lucchetti
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