Examples of Message

In the call to function Bernoulli, the first parameter, «p», should be greater than 
or equal to zero, but the array passed for this parameter contains a value that is either
negative or non-numeric at coordinate:
  Time=2012
  Plant='N337'

General form of message

In the call to function «fn», the «nth» parameter, «name», should be greater than or equal to zero, but the array passed for this parameter contains a value that is either negative or non-negative at coordinate:
 «coord»

Why this occurs

You are calling a function, where the n^th parameter is declared as NonNegative. You are passing an array of values to this parameter, and at least one of those values, the one at the indicated coordinate of the array, contains a value that is either non-numeric (e.g., textual, Null, etc), or is negative.

Tricks for debugging

Try copying and pasting the expression for the «nth» parameter into a different variable, say Va1. Then view its result table and find the coordinate that was listed in the error message. This will help you determine what the value is, and from there you can trace back to figure out why.

Work Arounds

Suppose you'd like to call the function for all the non-negative numeric cases, and just return Null for those cases that violate the parameter declaration.

If there is only one parameter at fault, and if that parameter expects a scalar, you could replace the original call:

 F(...,someExpr,...)

with

 Var tmp[]:=someExpr Do If IsNumber(tmp) and tmp>=0 then F(...,tmp,...) else Null

If the parameter at fault expects an array indexed by I,J, the same trick can be adapted like this:

 Var tmp[I,J]:=someExpr Do If Min(IsNumber(tmp) and tmp>=0,I,J) then F(...,tmp,...) else Null

Notice that F gets called only if every element in the I,J slice is non-negative and numeric.

If more than one parameter is bad, rather than extend the above trick with several Var..Do declarations, for each parameter, it is slightly more efficient to create a user-defined wrapper function, having the same parameter declaration as the original, but with the non-negative qualifier removed. For the example of Binomial, this would be:

 Function MyBinomial(n,p : atomic ; over:...optional atomic) 
 Definition: If IsNumber(p) and IsNumber(n) and and p>=0 and n>=0 then Binomial(n,p) else Null

This is slightly more efficient than multiple Var..Do declarations because the function call can coordinate the iteration over any indexes shared between n and p. In the original Binomial, both n and p are declared as NonNegative.

User Experiences

Caused by using List-of-labels by mistake

This error occurred when an index (which was intended to have numeric values) was defined as a list-of-labels, rather than as a list. It looked like numeric values, but they were really text values like: ['0%', '10%', ...].

The fix: Select the definition and change the definition type pulldown from "list of labels" to just "list". Then remove the quotes.

Please contribute

If you encountered this error and had trouble finding the root cause, or learned something new from the experience that might help in understanding the problem if it ever occurs again, please document it on this page for others.

Error Messages/40512

Contents