He had it coming, JAGS edition

From the JAGS help forum:

I figured it out. In case this is helpful for someone else, a way of adding a function [to JAGS] is to 1) go to src/modules/bugs/functions and add a .cc and .h file for your function (copy an existing one as a template) 2) edit both src/modules/bugs/functions/Makefile.in and src/modules/bugs/bugs.cc to reflect the addition 3) go to the top level and do a "autoreconf --force --install" to rebuild the configure file 4) configure, make, sudo make install as usual I apologise if this is not a good solution, but it did work for me.

The sampler for degrees of freedom in the Student's t distribution is behaving "badly" for my particular model and I'm facing the inevitable.... which reminds me that the following quote, from Troy Day's website is also applicable to programmers:

I love coding as much as the next guy, but not when it jumps out at you from some dark corner of a black box. Also, Chicago is relevant: