 approach to coding is a transferable skill...
The functions referred to are introduced in connection with this knowledge-based approach. New GAUSS users should be aware that there is a large body of routines available which are outwith the scope of this guide.
My Introduction to GAUSS for Economists contains more specific examples, exercise sets, short video films illustrating aspects of the interface, and a few worked examples of solving economic and econometric problems. The book aims to improve your technical competency in GAUSS through practice, and hence is complementary to this guide which is rather more theoretical.
Please note that this guide assumes some familiarity with elementary concepts in matrix algebra; that is, readers should know the difference between scalars, matrices, and vectors, and understand the basic mathematical operations.
The web pages are designed for screen sizes of 800x600 and above, and popular browsers that are relatively standards-compliant; specifically, Internet Explorer 5.5, Netscape Communicator 6.1 and Opera 6.0, and more recent versions. In some older browsers (particularly Netscape Navigator 4.7, which is common among Unix/Linux users) the text remains readable but most of the font and colour information is lost. If you do find something unreadable please let me know.
I hope you find this work useful. Please email comments to email@example.com, particularly if you find any errors or glaring omissions.
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This manual was originally prepared in February 1994 for the seminars on Introductory GAUSS Programming held in Stirling, Bristol and Glasgow, organised under the auspices of the CTI Centre for Computing in Economics. A minor revision followed in 1995.
In April 1997 it was revised again and placed on the web as Word/WordPerfect documents with PDF versions of the chapters. I also placed some code and programs on the web. Those of you who visited the site at that point will no doubt have been astonished by my design skills. In my defence, I will say that at this time I was writing one of the earliest academic websites in the country; the only information about writing web pages was to be found on the CERN site itself. For those wanting some light relief feel free to check out the web archive.
The gauss website http://scottie.stir.ac.uk/~fri01/gauss/ then stayed unchanged for the next five years, as I moved between various jobs, eventually leaving academic economics for the commercial sector. However, following my move to Trig Consulting in 2001, my involvement in econometric issues has increased again. Hence I decided to review the guide and republish it, particularly as in 2002 I started teaching GAUSS again.
The guide has now been redesigned entirely for the web, making it rather more user-friendly. Unfortunately, I do not intend to produce a single document available for downloads. I have also been working on a more practical physical manual, so the exercise sets will not reappear here.
The pages are still undergoing checking for GAUSS 4.0 and 5.0. Please check the news page for progress. You will also find there details of ongoing changes. Although the physical manual only gets changes at long intervals, I intend to maintain and update the on-line manual much more regularly.
Apart from the layout, those who have downloaded the guide over the last five years will find the content little changed. This is because GAUSS itself has changed relatively little, concentrating on its core strength of providing an interface to a remarkably efficient matrix manipulation engine. Most development work has gone into the window interfaces, add-ons, and the development of additional tools such as the Enterprise Edition and the GAUSS Engine.
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The training seminars were initiated under the auspices of the Centre for Computing in Economics at Bristol University and the ESRC.
I would like to thank Elizabeth Roberts of the Department of Economics at the University of Stirling who since 1990 has been a stalwart of econometric research there. She provided advice and comments on